14 DAY TRIAL // Samsung may have spoken of a project that would yield a 4TB hard disk drive, but it looks like Seagate was the one to finish first, as revealed in its new press release.
Solid state drives may have gained in base capacity over the past six months, but hard disk units have been constantly expanding their own, maintaining the gap.
The most recent episode in this saga consists of Seagate officially launching the latest and greatest in the GoFlex series of external products.
Essentially a 3.5-inch HDD inside a nice, black shell, the newcomer has a storage space of a full 4TB, a limit Samsung was aiming for, before it signed a deal with Seagate, letting the latter buy its whole HDD business.
The GoFlex product has the USB 3.0 interface, otherwise known as SuperSpeed, whose theoretical maximum transfer rate is 5 Gbps.
$250 is the price given to it and shipments are already being carried out. A model with FirerWire 800 (for Apple Mac systems) will debut next month (October, 2011).
“Yet another industry first for Seagate, we have reached a new high-capacity in the 3.5-inch hard drive form factor. At Seagate, we are committed to pushing the limits for our customers and will continue to adapt and innovate our products based on customer needs,” said Patrick Connolly, vice president and general manager of Retail products for Seagate.
“This latest GoFlex Desk drive offering, with its new industry-leading capacity point, is a statement of our continued commitment to meet consumer needs.”
Seagate pre-loaded the newcomer with software for automatic and continuous data backup, as well as encryption. Finally, an illuminated gauge on the special adapter show how much space is left.
“IDC foresees there being an increase in global demand for personal storage capacity driven by the growing creation and acquisition of digitized videos, photos and music,” said Liz Conner, senior research analyst, Storage Systems, IDC.