14 DAY TRIAL // Hard drive units need to maintain their capacity lead over solid-state drives in order to keep their role on the IT market.
That is why Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba have been developing platters with higher data densities.
Seagate is the one taking the lead now, having released the industry’s first 4 TB HDD made of 1 TB platters.
It is part of the Barracuda 7200.15 series and has a platter rotary speed of 7,200 RPM, a buffer memory of 64 MB and the SATA 6 Gbps interface.
It is enough for a transfer speed of 146 MB/s, not really close to the 500+ MB/s of SSDs, but still impressive.
The 4 TB HDD has a price of $190 / 190 Euro (OEM version) or $212 / 212 Euro (retail, with cables and documentation). A 5 TB drive could be near as well.