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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ddarko - Monday, December 12, 2011 - link
Jarred, you may need to change it back to the original text of five platters. VR Zone has a pic of the drive and it seems to show five read/write heads:http://vr-zone.com/articles/hitachi-makes-4tb-desk...
ATWindsor - Saturday, December 10, 2011 - link
Five platters or not, hitachi has delivered the most solid drives in terms of realiabilty the later years, despite being the only(?) ones having five-platter drives for desktop. They are the top choice for hassle-free RAID.Gamblodar - Saturday, December 10, 2011 - link
I'm still not sure some of us will ever trust them again after the 75GXPMrSpadge - Saturday, December 10, 2011 - link
Everyone's entitled to his/her prejudice. Just make sure you're clear about the fact that the problem with the old drives has absolutely nothing to do with the current drives.MrS
melgross - Saturday, December 10, 2011 - link
I agree, my Seagate uses 4.KeithP - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
I am currently using a Seagate 4TB HD on my Mac Pro so how is this one the first???Did you mean Hitachi's first 4TB HD?
daneren2005 - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
I think they actually meant the first internal HDD (and by that I mean first commercially sold internal HDD, as obviously you could have taken the HDD out of a external enclosure and made it an internal HDD)melgross - Saturday, December 10, 2011 - link
No, that's wrong. The Seagate internal was bought by me a month ago.Kristian Vättö - Sunday, December 11, 2011 - link
Seagate's website doesn't have a word about a 4TB drive. Some vendors may take the externals apart and sell the drive as internal, but that is not an official drive. Or the situation is the same as in this case, it's on sale even though an official announcement has not been made.Tchamber - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
I wonder how many of us actually feel safe using a drive that big. I myself wouldnt put that much data on one disk.