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.
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dalmvern Larger capacity drives usually come out as external first because internal drives have space limitation where externals dont.Reply -
To be more exact (using 150KB/s uncompressed CD sound, and 1TB=1000GB, 1GB=1000MB) that's 1.06 years of music playing 24-7. But because it's Seagate, the drive will fail before you get to that point.Reply
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jcb82 These companies CONSUMER businesses are in jeopardy once cloud computing becomes mainstream. I'm sure they'd be looking to form stronger ties with corporations that provide cloud services as of now.Reply
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Trialsking HansVonOhain5 Months would be in March.Did they edit it, because I see 3 months but 5 TB?!?!?Reply -
dalmvern jcb82These companies CONSUMER businesses are in jeopardy once cloud computing becomes mainstream. I'm sure they'd be looking to form stronger ties with corporations that provide cloud services as of now.Reply
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. -
amk-aka-Phantom Wow, I don't have enough pr0n to fill that drive! :DReply
HansVonOhain5 Months would be in March.
Thanks for stating the obvious.
Seagatehasbeenhjunksincethe80sTo be more exact (using 150KB/s uncompressed CD sound, and 1TB=1000GB, 1GB=1000MB) that's 1.06 years of music playing 24-7. But because it's Seagate, the drive will fail before you get to that point.
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).
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drwho1 This is what I'm waiting for!Reply
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!