5TB External HDDs Arriving in Three Months?
Seagate may introduce a 5TB external hard drive using five 1TB platters in January 2012.
Is Seagate shipping 5 TB hard drives three months from now? That's a hint the company dropped in a recent interview at GITEX 2011, a technology event held in Dubai. Seagate later followed up after the event by saying that an eventual 5 TB drive isn't any real revelation, nor is the timeframe in which the product may arrive.
"Now we have 1 TB per disk," said a Seagate Middle East salesperson by the name of Christian six minutes into the interview. "If you just do a simple calculation ... now a drive can have five disks ... so suddenly you make the disk 5 TB ... within three months you will see it."
Seagate first introduced a GoFlex Desk external hard drive featuring 1 TB platters and an areal density of 625 Gigabits per square inch back in May, revealing a special 3-platter, 3 TB Barracuda XT hard drive crammed inside (which typically uses 5 platters for 3 TB). According to the company, that's enough capacity to store up to 120 high-definition movies, 1,500 video games, thousands of photos or "virtually countless hours of digital music."
Then in September the company added a 4 TB version to its GoFlex Desk line of external drives, but instead of using 1 TB platters, it featured a 5-platter (800 GB each) 7200RPM design. Seagate will reportedly introduce an internal 4 TB hard drive in November which will also use the 5-platter (800 GB each) 7200RPM design.
That said, it's safe to assume that Seagate's 5 TB storage monster will arrive in the form of a GoFlex Desk external drive first, and will likely be revealed during CES 2012 in January. Of course, that's just guesswork based on Seagate's current pattern.

When will the industry realize that these values are meaningless.
Did they edit it, because I see 3 months but 5 TB?!?!?
Cloud computing has serious limitations though, first of which is your internet connection. I work with large databases and fiber is not available in my area, so there is no way I would be able to work from home using the cloud.
Thanks for stating the obvious.
Nonsense; Seagate is a great brand and has been very reliable for me. There're some Seagates that came out when SATA first appeared, and they still run fine on the PCs I repair...
Anyway, I've got a WD 1.36 TB external drive and it still has 880GB free. What I want now is more affordable SSDs; very few people have enough data to even fill 2TB (unless they download every movie they see and hear about, like some do).
Of course the first year the price will be prohibitive, but soon after that a 5TB internal drive will be around $150-$180 US.
I will a few of this when they hit that point.
I currently have most of my movies on hard drives and I have simply ran out of space. I want 8 of this 5TB drives in a NAS!
Yippee.. lets get technical! Assuming typical CD-quality music, then you're dealing with PCM 16 bit 44.1khz quality sound, which has an uncompressed bit rate of 1411.1kilobits/second. Convert that to kiloBYTES is 176.4KB/s. Also, 1024 KB = 1 MB, and 1024 MB = 1 GB not multiples of 1000!! So convert to real storage numbers 5*1000/1024 = 4.8828125. 4.8828125*1024*1024*1024/176.4 = 29721542 seconds of music or 344 days of music.
When will the industry realize that these values are meaningless.
are these songs 128kbps mp3 or flac? are these pictures 1 or 14 megapixels? are these videos youtube or blu-ray quality?
but that 1500 video games claim up there takes the cake, are those 15mb or 15gb games?
morons.
No problem with seagate unreliability when using RAID 5
And you dont think that people hosting your info on the cloud would love to get their hands on this, a server with 12 1TB drives could go from being able to store 12TB to 60TB with same power output.
256 kbps MP3s sound like crap? I'm sorry, but there are *very* few people that can hear the difference between 256 kbps MP3s and the original uncompressed audio. Even if you are one of those lucky few, actually hearing the difference requires listening through an extremely accurate sound system (i.e. studio monitors).
I think you're awesome because of your super high standards.