Hitachi has officially confirmed two new models of 4TB hard drives in the form of the the Deskstar 5K4000 Internal Hard Drive Kit and the Touro Desk External Hard Drive.
The 4TB Deskstar 5K4000 is a 3.5-inch hard drive with a 32MB cache buffer and Hitachi's CoolSpin power-management technology. Combined with Hitachi's other power-management tools, CoolSpin offers up to a 28-percent idle power savings over the company's Deskstar 7K3000 7200 RPM drives and an idle acoustic level of 2.5 bels. The 5K4000 also uses Hitachi's Advanced Format technology, which increases the sector size on the hard disk drive from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes for increased capacities and improved error correction capabilities.
The new 4TB Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 Hard Drive Retail Kit is currently shipping in limited quantities to online and retail stores with a suggested retail price of $399.99. Hitachi will be shipping the Deskstar 5K4000 (bare drives and bulk pack) to OEMs, distributors and channel partners worldwide in Q1 2012.
The external solution, the Hitachi Touro Desk External Drive is a USB 3.0 storage solution with a Deskstar 5K4000 HDD under the hood and is both Mac and PC compatible. It comes bundled with 3GB of cloud storage for free from HitachiBackup.com and will be available in January for approximately $420.