Seagate Says 5TB HDDs Are Coming Soon

Hard disk drive makers have pretty much chosen to have hard drive capacity grow on a regular basis, so as to maintain its position in the wake of SSDs, and Seagate says it should make the next leap within three months' time.

Seagate has been in the hard disk drive business for many years now and, naturally, it plans to keep exploiting every ounce of resources it has to keep its status and customers.

The company does make solid state drives as well, but its major revenue source is still the HDD market.

Not too long ago, the outfit released a 4TB GoFlex HDD unit, which is basically the largest capacity that HDDs can have at the moment.

This won't be the case for long, however, at least not overly so, according to a certain interview with tbreakTV.

What a Seagate middle East salesperson, named Christian, said was that 5TB units, that is drives with five platters of 1TB each, are going to appear in three months.

Since this is the start of the fourth quarter, that time frame would place the launch of 5TB HDDs in January.

It isn't hard to assume that the 2012 edition of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is where things will go down.

“Now we have 1 TB per disk,” said the salesperson. “If you just do a simple calculation ... now a drive can have five disks ... so suddenly you make the disk 5 TB ... within three months you will see it.”

The five platter design will show up earlier than the 5TB itself, in a unit with 800GB platters (4 TB total). It will work at a rotary speed of 7,200 RPM (rotations per minute).

Signs seem to point towards the 5TB flagship belonging to the same GoFlex external series as the aforementioned 4TB one from September, 2011. Whether this assumption proves true remains to be seen.