Seagate to unveil 'affordable' 6TB HDD

Seagate 6TB hard disk drive
Seagate's 6TB hard disk drive for consumers

HGST might have been the first company out of the door with a 6TB HDD but Seagate has been the more aggressive player until now. The storage company has seven 6TB SKUs already available on the market, targeting enterprises and business.

These drives have been officially launched at the beginning of the week and it is likely that a much cheaper version will be available very shortly.

Indeed, TechRadar Pro has managed to track down an eighth one on Newegg called the STBD6000100, available for £227 (around $380, AU$410).It is a 3.5-inch model with the same base specifcation as its enterprise siblings like a SATA interface, 6-platter design, a 7200RPM spinning speed and 128MB cache.

Good enough for most

It does, however, lack some of the business features, such as self encryption and a five-year warranty. But at less than half the price, few will complain. All the eight 6TB Seagate hard disk drives can be purchased from a number of vendors (although the cheaper version is only available at the time of writing in the US).

Unlike HGST, Seagate has refrained from putting helium in its hard disk drives. It means that these 6TB models are likely to be noisier, consume more power and dissipate more heat.

Given the surprisingly affordable price tag on that 6TB hard disk drive (which translates into an aggressive price of £38 [$63, AU$67] per terabyte), we expect it to be a best-seller.

Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.

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