14 DAY TRIAL // At the beginning of this month, Seagate announced the introduction of the world's first external hard drive to feature 4TB of storage capacity and reports suggest the company is now planning to release the desktop version of this drive in November of this year.
Seagate will most probably use the same HDD as the one installed in the 4TB Go Flex Desktop Hard Drive, which is based on a Barracuda XT design with five 800GB platters.
This is expected to feature a spindle speed of 7200RPM, making it one of the fastest high-capacity HDDs on the market, most probably at the expense of noise and power consumption.
According to a report published by Fudzilla, Seagate has decided to go with such a high-speed motor in order to reduce costs, since the publication points out that manufacturing 5400RPM energy-efficient motors is actually harder than building 7200RPM parts.
The actual hard drive that will result from Seagate's efforts is expected to carry a 64MB buffer and support for the SATA 6Gbps interface while using the standard 3.5-inch form factor.
As far as pricing is concerned, it seems like Seagate's 4TB drive won't provide the same low price per GB as its 2TB or 3TB counterparts, but this is to be expected considering this it will most probably be the first 4TB 3.5-inch HDD to reach the market.
The launch of the Seagate drive is expected to take place in November, but this information wasn't confirmed by the company.
Last year, Seagate introduced the world’s first 3TB hard drive which was also made available in a GoFlex Desk external storage solution.
The 3.5-inch standalone version of that drive followed a couple of moths later, but Western Digital spoiled the fun for Seagate as it also unveiled a similar 3TB HDD at about the same time.