Seagate Now Shipping World's First 4TB Hard Drive with 1TB Platters

[Pardus]

Source

A representative for Seagate dropped us a note today to let us know the company is now shipping what it claims is the industry's first and only 4TB hard drive to utilize 1TB-per-platter technology. According to Seagate, the four-platter design is a winning one that allows for the highest performance possible while doubling capacity and reducing costs, ultimately giving consumers the best of all worlds.

To put that kind of storage space in perspective, Seagate says its 4TB drive is nearly 800,000 times larger than the first desktop drive it introduced way back in 1979. There's enough storage space to tuck away 800,000 photos, 450 hours of HD video, or over 1 million songs, "all at the lowest cost per gigabyte in the industry," Seagate says.

The drive also boasts the highest average data rate of any desktop HDD on the market at 146MB/s. At the same time, it consumes 35 percent less power than the competition, Seagate claims. Other features include 64MB of cache and a 5,900 RPM spindle speed.

You can find the drive online in retail trim for around $212 shipped, or as low as $190 for the bare drive.

 

[philipma1957]

Not to argue about speed but I have a few HGST 4tb 7200 rpm hdds and they run at 165Mb/s to 170MB/s for at least the first 2.3Tb of the drive. I wonder if these seagates are at 170 to 175MB/s for the first half then slow to get that 146MB/s number.

Do you have any test links I know that hdds slow near the last 40% so I am curious about the high to low drop on the drive. The 146MB/s average is nice.

 

[rsutoratosu]

Conflicting reports, but i think 5900 is correct.

http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_announces_availability_of_desktop_hdd_4tb - reports 7200.

I wanna see this vs the hitachi & wd 4tb 7200.. The seagate drive is almost 60dollars cheaper... if it performs the same as 7200, its definitely worth it

 

[VirtualLarry]

The 4TB Seagate 7200 is using 5 800GB platters. The 4TB with 1TB platters is 5900 RPM.

It's been available at Newegg for at least a few weeks already.

 

[Mfusick]

The speed increase of 1tb platter density is offset by the lower 5900rom spindle speed.

Performance of both the 4TB with 5 platters if 800gb and performance if 4 platters of 1TB is basically the same.

The Seagate 7200 rpm with 3 1TB platters is still the heavyweight champion in today's market. Very fast, very cheap, very reliable.

 

[mxnerd]

Why HD vendors always lower speed of their biggest hard disk? Any reasonable explanation?

 

[386DX]

Why HD vendors always lower speed of their biggest hard disk? Any reasonable explanation?

Physics. With higher areal density platter the head have less room for errors. You can either give the head more area to read (lower density platter 800 MB instead of 1TB) or give it more time to read by spinning it slower (5900 rpm instead of 7200 rpm). This is why you never see 15K rpm drives with large capacity.

 

[AdamK47]

5900RPM? Oh hard drives, you so silly.

 

[Wyndru]

Isn't WD also on schedule to ship 5TB (5 platter green and red) drives later this year?

 

[Mfusick]

Isn't WD also on schedule to ship 5TB (5 platter green and red) drives later this year?

Probably but those drives will also probably fail early like most of the new WD drives.

Is it me or is WD slowly losing its superior position ?

 

[Charles Kozierok]

What amazes me is how the HDD makers have actually slowed down their pace of innovation even as SDDs give them their biggest challenge, well, ever. When's the last time we even had a bump up in capacity? From what I can see, 4 TB drives have been around for 18 months already. Where are the 5 TB drives? Or 10 TB?

The difference in performance between 800 GB and 1 TB platters is not really that significant, especially given that most performance-sensitive applications are going solid state anyway.

At the rate things are going, in ten years the hard drive makers will be out of business.

 

[dma0991]

Would prefer to see both Seagate and WD improving the reliability of their larger drives rather than density. Bought a 2TB Green a while back and it already has bad sectors. Bought another two 3TB Green as a mirror copy of current data. Can't imagine the frustration of losing data from a dead HDD.

At the rate things are going, in ten years the hard drive makers will be out of business.

Highly unlikely considering that there are only 2 manufacturers left in the game. Also, demand for mass storage isn't on a steep decline anytime soon when SSDs aren't exactly competitive when it comes to GB/$.