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Wondering if anyone has seen these new drives? New “Shingled” Hard Drives Hold Terabytes For Pennies A Gig | TechCrunch Of course they'd make great back up drives. That's what they are for. But how about using them for a server like Cortez or NAS to store our music files? The drives have low RPM so maybe less electrical noise and mechanical noise. For those of us with large collections, this would allow most of us to have all music files on one drive and get another to back it up. I'm thinking 4 eventually. 1 for DSD the other for PCM plus two for backups. Below is the info from the link above. While the last time most of us thought of shingles was when we were itchy in eighth grade, Seagate has been thinking of them as a way to store data. Called Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) Drives, Seagate’s new drives can store 8 terabytes of data for about 3 cents a gigabyte. The catch? These are great back-up drives but they’re not very fast. At 5,900 RPM and an average read/write speed of 150MB/sec, you’re looking at something that’s far slower than an average SSD drive (1,800MB/sec) and even the average 7,200 RPM hard drive. Shingled drives cram more tracks onto a single platter and reduce the minuscule space between tracks. This means you can fit over a terabyte on one spinning HDD platter. Therefore these drives work best with a faster SSD drive on the front end and then these slower drives for less important storage. For example, you could stack a few for some serious fleet backup power or you could place seldom-used data files on the drive and work with fast-moving files on an SSD. Seagate will ship the drives in January for $260 for an 8 terabyte version. Considering the first 1TB drives cost $375 in 2007, that’s an impressive jump. I intend to fill my 8TB drive with photographs of food and home video of my navel. You?