With its 6 TB desktop hard drives selling for as low as $300, Seagate is pushing up the density envelope. The company is ready with functional engineering samples of its 8 TB (8,000 GB) hard drives, and has sent them over to major enterprise (hosting / cloud) customers for reliability testing and feedback. Seagate CEO Steve Luczo revealed this, at last week's Q4FY earnings call, responding to a question.

Seagate is eyeing customers among cloud storage providers with its gargantuan hard drives. Cost-effective cloud storage is being seen as the biggest driver of storage capacity expansion among hard drive makers. On the subject of its upcoming drives, Luczo stated: "While it's still early in the development of our Kinetic object-based storage platform, we are in deep technical discussions with a very broad-base of enterprise customers. We believe our focus on developing key values for object-based storage will make the Kinetic platform a differentiated offering in the cloud storage marketplace." Seagate didn't mention when it plans to actually launch the 8 TB drive, as that would depend on the kind of feedback it receives from those customers.