Breaking Down The Tech Wall: 4 TB Hard Drives

Technology moves fast, hard drive capacity has exploded over the last decade. I remember back when I was in high school 500 GB hard drives were the bleeding edge and were very expensive, about a year after that terabyte drive was on rumor and 750 gb was the edge, and then terabyte drives hit the pc world. Since then hard drives have gotten bigger and smaller, faster, more power efficient, and higher in capacity drastically if I might add. The bar is yet again getting raised before this year’s end, and Hitachi and Seagate both have products due to hit the consumer market soon.

In the 3.5 inch consumer grade drive in this case an external drive SKU, Seagate is offering 4 Terabytes in one physical drive. The first of it’s kind on the market, this drive has some incredible stuff going on inside of it. Speaking of internal I’m assuming Seagate will also release bare drives for PC’s and servers. Though you can easily take a drive out of an external enclosure and put it into what ever you want.

In the 2.5 inch world Hitachi has a drive so dense it pushes the physical barrier to greater heights. Though this drive is not 4TB its a 2.5 inch drive with a 1.5 Tb capacity, thats record setting as well. The current champion in capacity is the 1Tb, and the standard in laptops is 640gb for most consumers. Why is this so impressive you ask? Well it’s about density, many years ago 3.5 inch drives broke into the Terabyte zone, and that was impressive, but these 2.5 inch drives are much smaller and contain a lot less physical space and less platters, this advance is purely density and technique. No street date on this drive yet, but rumors point to early 2012.