Seagate has launched the largest NAS optimised drive on the market, targeted at small businesses for personal cloud and multimedia storage.

The NAS HDD 8TB is the world's highest-capacity drive optimised for RAID, NAS and server storage.

These scalable drives address the ever-growing data challenges for the SMB, Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) and creative professional segments, according to Seagate.

The new 8TB drives are designed for tower enclosures with one to eight bays, delivering up to 64TB in a single eight-bay desktop form factor.

This high storage density gives small business the high capacity and flexibility to address the data challenges on the immediate horizon while preparing for the future, the company says.

“Our customers are finding themselves under more pressure than ever as the volume of data they need to deal with continues to increase dramatically,” says David Chiang, QNAP Systems general manager of business division.

“The new Seagate NAS HDD 8TB will offer professionals a huge capacity with which to easily manage this growing amount of data," he says.

Data volumes continue to increase at an astounding rate. In fact, IDC's Digital Universe Study forecasting that the world's annual data creation will increase by ten-fold between 2013 and 2020 to 44 zettabytes.

Seagate's own research has revealed that SMBs in particular are choosing NAS solutions over other storage technologies such as storage area networks (SAN) and direct attached storage (DAS) to help manage this looming surge in data.

Of the people who preferred NAS, 18% do so because of price, 16% for ease-of-use and 10% for quality, the research finds.

“Delivering the flexibility and access that users require is a constant challenge, especially in a world where there are more users with more devices expecting seamless access and flawless performance,” says Chad Chiang, Synology product manager.

“NAS solutions are rapidly becoming the storage medium of choice for organisations with limited IT resources that need a quick and easy solution to manage their data.

"The new Seagate 8TB drives will give our customers incredible capacity to handle the huge volumes of data their users are creating and sharing,” he says.

The new Seagate NAS 8TB HDD is optimised for a range of NAS use cases including backup and disaster recovery, print and file servers, multimedia storage, archiving, file sharing and virtualisation.

In addition, NAS manufacturers including ASUSTOR, QNAP, Synology and Thecus have qualified the NAS HDD 8TB for compatibility in a number of their products.

The new Seagate NAS HDD 8TB has shipped to select customers, with wide-scale availability at the end of the current quarter.