14 DAY TRIAL // While this year was the one where top suppliers of HDDs brought forth the first 3TB hard disk drives, analysts, or at least one firm, believes that 2011 will be the year when that maximum capacity is expanded to 4TB.
There are two ways that HDD makers could create units with capacities of 4TB.
One would be to manage an areal density of more than 530 Gb per square inch, much higher in fact, which may make it a bit tricky to pull off.
The other solution would be to start making drives with five platters, the type that Hitachi already deals in, though 4TB is still beyond the company's ability.
Western Digital has 3TB units on sale, and they each use four platters with this density, meaning four platters of 750GB each.
Thus, a 4TB drive would need its platters to each provide a full 1TB all on their own.
While not out of the real of possibility, the fact is that, even if such platters did show up, they would probably first end up inside HDDs of smaller form factors (2.5-inch, 1.8-inch), delaying their use in 3.5-inch beasts.
It should also be noted that most existing PCs don't actually have what it takes to handle drives with more than 2.2TB of storage.
This will reduce the number of consumers interested in top-grade HDDs and, thus, make it unlikely that hard disk drive makers would go out of their way to push them into the market early.
Still, Coughlin Associates market research firm is said to be quite convinced that 4TB units will show up next year.
"Besides widespread use of desktop storage technology enabling 3TB storage capacity earlier in the year we might see higher desktop capacities later in the year (depending upon the slowing rate of areal density increases),” said Thomas M. Coughlin, the founder of Coughlin Associates.
“At the very least we will probably see 4TB or higher external storage with small additional increase in areal density and using 5 [platters]. We expect that 2.5" external storage will move beyond the 2TB available today to as high as 3TB and laptop 2.5" drives with 1.5- 2.0TB could happen in the second half of 2011 or early in 2012,” he added.