Hitachi Ships The First 4TB Hard Drive
by Kristian Vättö on December 9, 2011 2:30 PM ESTHitachi has started shipping the world's first hard drive with 4TB capacity. There has not been an official press release from Hitachi yet, but a Japanese site Akiba has spotted the hard drive on sale. The hard drive carries model number HDS5C4040ALE630 and is branded as Deskstar 5K.
The brand suggests that it's a lower performance drive with rotational speed of 5900rpm (Hitachi calls this "CoolSpin"). The drive comes with 32MB of cache just like the 2TB and 3TB versions, and uses SATA 6Gb/s interface. The drive is priced at 26,800 Yen, which translates to $345. For comparison, the 3TB Deskstar 5K costs 19,780 Yen ($254), so the price per GB is very close. The drive appears to use five platters, so two more platter than the previous 3TB monster.
The release comes at an odd time because hard drive supply is still very limited due to the floods in Thailand. The components of this drive are manufactured in Thailand according to the product packaging, meaning that the supply may be very limited in the short term. There is no word on global availability, though.
Source: Akiba (Google Translation)
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anactoraaron - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
"The drive is priced at 26,800 yen which translates to $345." And due to the hard drive shortage the drive will be priced today at $799.gevorg - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
Five platters? FIVE? Will not touch.ChuckDriver - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
I believe that is the same number of platters as the infamous Deskstar 75GXP.Slash3 - Saturday, December 10, 2011 - link
I am continually amazed at the fact that my ye olde 75GB 75GXP is still in use in a system and has never given me one problem.Gamblodar - Saturday, December 10, 2011 - link
You really should make a living as a gambler in Vegas and buy every lotto ticket you can. The yearly failure rate on those things was what, 50%? So after 10 years of use, you have the one drive in 1024.Though, I probably jinxed it and the drive will die by the time you get to the ending punctuation mark in this sentence.
MrSpadge - Saturday, December 10, 2011 - link
No, he's probably just not letting the drive idle. The problem was some new stuff sticking to the read/write heads if they were not moved for too long. It was fixed by a firmware update, but at that point it was far too late.MrS
Abix - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
Yeeeeech. Pass on five platters.Zoomer - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
Lots of top capacity drives uses 5 platters.JarredWalton - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
Sorry, I screwed up and put five, but I believe it's four (1TB platters).JarredWalton - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
Actually, I had "five platters, one more than the 4TB monster" when it should have been "four platters, one more than the 3TB monster" -- fixed now.