Seagate Ships First 8 Terabyte Hard Drive
MojoKid (1002251) writes Seagate announced today that it has begun shipping the world's first 8 Terabyte hard drive. The 8TB hard drive comes only five months after Western Digital released the first ever 6TB HDD. Up until then, Seagate's high capacity HDDs had been shipping only to select enterprise clients. The 8TB HDD comes in the 3.5-inch form factor and, according to the manufacturer, features a SATA 6Gbps interface and multi-drive RV tolerance which makes it suitable for data centers. It's unclear what technology the drive is based on, or if PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) or low-resistance helium technology was employed.
Before SSD's were all the rage, a common thing to get a speed boost was to do 'short stroke' the drive. Essentially, all you do is only partition the first third of the drive and use that space.
The theory is that the head doesn't need to move around as much and speeds up the drive. I've never done it but modders used to swear by it.