Seagate has announced the world’s first 8TB hard drive. The company says the new 3.5-inch drive will offer the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and unprecedented storage density.

The high capacity allows server operators to increase capacity without wasting space. Higher density also translates into superior power efficiency, which is a crucial factor in this market segment. Seagate argues the drive has applications beyond the server room. It could also attract some home users, especially people with huge personal video collections. 4K video is still not mainstream, but it is slowly getting there and once it becomes widespread even basic family videos will end up taking a lot of room.

“As our world becomes more mobile, the number of devices we use to create and consume data is driving an explosive growth in unstructured data. This places increased pressure on cloud builders to look for innovative ways to build cost-effective, high capacity storage for both private and cloud-based data centers,” said Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing

Seagate says its new 8TB drives feature enterprise-class reliability and support for archive workloads. The first drive uses the SATA 6Gbps interface, which is more or less consumerish, but it is fast enough for an archive drive in a more serious setting.