Last year, Seagate announced their 8 TB Archive HDD, and as of recently, this drive has actually become available through retail channels. It features both a very high storage capacity and a relatively low price per gigabyte. How did Seagate manage to accomplish this? And would the Archive HDD be a good choice for your PC or NAS? Read all about it in this review.

Although the maximum storage capacity of hard drives has been steadily increasing over the years, innovation seems to have slowed down as of late. While this can partially be explained by the rising popularity of SSDs, the fact that manufacturers are slowly approaching the limit of what's physically possible also plays a role. Using contemporary technologies, a capacity of approximately 1 TB to 1.2 TB per platter (the internal magnetic disks that make up hard drives) seems to be the most that manufacturers can offer. At the same time, the use of conventional methodologies allows them to house a maximum of five or six such platters within a 3.5? enclosure. For example, Western Digital's 6 TB hard drives use five platters of 1.2 TB each.