Seagate Launching "Industry's First" 4TB HDD

Keep pushing capacity... I am glad the SSD revolution isn't stymieing HDD evolution...

I feel like this capacity should have been available a while ago. Anyway, +1 to Seagate for being the first.

Since when does a HD movie take up 2GB?

Cost for this drive: $249.
Cost of 2,000 HD movies (if each movie is $10): $20,000.

If you buy them yes my guess is Seagate knows that most who fill this with 2,000 HD movies probably won't do it legally, but just won't come out and say it

@julius 85

H264......

When they are ripped from BluRay using x264 codec. Videos can be anywhere from 2gig up.

A Blu-Ray copy can be as much as 20+GB. You can compress the hell out of it and get it below 2GB. Maybe most people won't notice the difference on a (up to) 36" TV, but for some of use, we enjoy quality and do as little compression as possible. I make ISOs out of my DVDs, and haven't really found a solution I like for HD content, so I just use the discs.

Maybe the introduction of this 4TB drives will allow me to build that 20TB NAS I have been thinking about without breaking the bank.

I wish I could sell my home-movies for 10 bux a pop...
Think: Uncompressed, 15 minute long, videos of your kids lifetime accomplishments, like 1st steps and Bar Mitzvah...

NEVER use a big HDD. Best is to split into smaller ones, preferrably with backups. I use a 500GB drive in my PC, and it only has installed programs and games on it - the movies/photos/music are on the external drives. (That way I also won't ever need any "cloud"... because my drives can be connected to any of my PCs, lol)

Plus 4 TB would be a pain in the neck to fill up even with USB 3.0... and I don't even have 1 TB of data!

A change in material focus and a 18+ age requirement would probably net you home movies worth $10 or more.

I could get four x 2TB (= 8 TB) Samsung Spinpoint drives for the price of this seagate 4TB drive.

that's 4 Terabytes free! does anyone know what that means?

@noblerabbit

The MPIAA, RIAA and Comcast would like a chat with you ?

You know what's annoying? Measuring a measurable amount using an arbitrary unit. I could make tons of 1-second-long HD movies and that would skyrocket the count. I could also take very long HD movies and that would plummet the count. Same goes for photos, mp3's, etc.
Just say 4 TB and leave it at that...

Just give us decently priced NAS supporting RAID5 and let us use whatever size HDD we want ...

@amk-aka-phantom huh what? should I be scurred? I just fired up a dell R510 I picked up from ebay with 2x 146GB 15k cheetahs for boot and packed it with 12x2tb SATAs for storage in Raid6 for my home media server that will live in the garage. I also have a cheap little eSATA 4 bay enclosure with 4 x 2TB in a software raid 5 that has been running for about 2 years without a hitch, although it's getting close to full.

If you could attain USB 3 speeds, and not be bottle necked by the controller USB3 should, in theory, outperformance 3Gb/s SATA, but not quite up to 6Gb/s SATA. I have a kingston thumb drive that does 125MB/s in both directions which out be perfectly fine if this drive could match that.

Personally I like single platter drives for data due to less heat, quieter, and generally higher MTBF, but I usually go for what is big and cheap and raid it. What you said about never use a big HDD is just silly. I have a box at work with about 200 8-20GB drives in there that eventually I'm supposed to break out the drill and destroy, do you want them instead?

As far as this thing? Meh, I'll wait for 4TB internals. hmm 12x4TB in my R510 would be me enough room for over 1000 Blu-ray images assuming 40GB each, although across my current 250ish blu-ray images they are average out to about 25-30GB. WOohooo! hurry up 4TB internals.

Triple DES is nothing more three applications of 56-bit DES (for a total of 168-bits in the keyspace). DES is EXTREMELY slow, I would never use it to encrypt 4TB of data. With Intel's recent addition of native instructions for AES, it would seem to be the only logical cipher to choose for this application.

I got a 3 TB external for ~$120 earlier this year. I don't remember the exact price, but two of those is still cheaper than this. You pay a steep premium for the highest-density drives and unless you really need that right now, it is never worth it. These things lose value like discrete GPUs, only worse. No thanks.

I'm glad that there is finally a 4TB drive, now just wait until 4TB bare drives are available, then wait about a year for them to come down to about $100-125 and I might buy then.

I currently have 6 2TB drives and 1 1TB drive on my PC and they are all with "breathing problems". (FULL)

So obviously I would like to get my hands on 6 of this drives when the price is right. (it will be soon enough)

They'll be a lot of porno addicts happy about seeing this I suspect.

Plus the ones that mention that they like this new seagate idea coming into play soon.

lol that was exactly my first thought.
My average HD movie is probably around 8GB.

2-year warranty? Not interested at all!

so in rough numbers:

In 1990 we had 20 Megabyte harddisks
In 2000 we had 20 Gigabyte harddisks
In 2011 we are approaching 20 Petabyte harddisks

I guess in ten years we have 20 Terrabyte harddisks

Seems unreal, but almost certainly bound to happen!

20 Petabyte's now? I wish..

Someone got mixed up..

Umm, no. No one has a Petabyte HD for sale. NAS yes (200PB, from IBM) but not a single disk. I’m sure you mixed that up but even so in 10 years we’ll be lucky to have a 1PB (1000TB) drive.

I just wish they would stop overstating the HD capacity. It’s getting a little ridicules at these drive sizes. Every OS I’ve used over the last 25 years says 1024KB = 1MB of RAM or HD space not 1000KB! When I buy 8GB of RAM I get 8192MB of RAM.
So now you fire up and format your new 4TB HD and you get 3.6-ish TB not 4TB! They need to be forced to use a different nomenclature.

i gotta say, that's a lot of pr0n on one drive

Well sir it seems you skipped terabytes. 1 gb is 1000 mb. 1 tb is 1000 gb.
Following the trend, we should have a 20 terabyte hd by now. How did u get 20 Pb?

Tanquen, this has been discussed before and the IEEE agreed that Mega, Giga, and Tera (and Peta, etc.) are decimal magnitudes. Mega is 10^6, Giga is 10^9, and Tera is 10^12. Mebi, Gibi, and Tebi are binary magnitudes. So you have 8 Gibibytes of ram, but 4 Terabytes (3.6ish Tebibytes) of HDD space.

I wish more manufacturers would focus on speed of hdd compared to the storage.