Seagate say they have the first 4TB hard drive on the market, that’s not exactly accurate. Still, each of the 4 platters holding an astonishing 1TB each. Each inch of the disk surface incorporates 340,000 unique tracks that are just 75 nanometres wide. It’s an amazing technological feat that continues to extend the life of spinning disks well past when we all expected to be overtaken with solid state.
Despite the drive density, the speed is not sacrificed. The drive is capable of 600MB/s transfer rates with an average latency of 5.10ms, only slightly up from the 4.16ms of the 2 and 3TB models.
In 4TH you can store a heck of a lot of data, in practical terms, that’s around 800,000 photos, 450 hours of HD video, or over 1 million songs (but you stream them nowadays anyway).
While the largest drive on the market isn’t cheap, Seagate claim it’s the lowest cost per gigabyte in the industry. That may be the case, but you’ll easily pickup 2x2TB drives for less than the price of the Desktop HDD.15
In Australia, the 5900PRM 4TB Seagate drive will set you back $405.90 from Ingram Micro.
