Seagate rolls out ‘first’ quad-platter 4TB hard drive

By “first”, we mean that it’s the first hard drive to ship with a 1TB-per-platter design, as nicely pointed out by CNET. It’s a standard 4TB SATA drive, and will retail for US$190. Here’s all the details you need to know about Seagate’s first multi-platter 4TB HDD.

Pen not includedThe new drive is outfitted with 64MB cache and works with all version of SATA, even up to SATA 3 which has an astonishing 6GBps transfer rate. The drive will spin at a slower speed, 5900rpm compared to the mostly standard 7200rpm. Seagate promises that the drive will still provide great performance (can maintain a write speed of 145Mbps) , at roughly 35% less energy consumption. Seagate’s designed the drive for any working or personal environment, and will perform well as a backup drive, server storage and home drive.

Most of all, the 4TB drive will drive down costs for HDDs in general. For those who want the hard drive in an external case, you’ll be set back US$212. Just to put things in perspective, similar drives cost in the region of US$250 and more. We say the more the merrier. The cheaper drives, the easier it will be for us to backup those HD-format Breaking Bad reruns.

It’s not as if a 4TB drive is even considered a technological feat. We have flash drives that reach up to 1TB (for ludicrous prices) and server setups with endless terabytes to spare. What is important is pricing. Hard drive pricing, storage in general has a knockdown effect, much like the price of fuel. If fuel goes up, everything goes up. If data pricing increases, computers become US$50-100 more expensive. Seagate’s power-efficent, quad-platter drive is hopefully the beginning of less-expensive storage. Remember who to thank if your new laptop seems slightly more affordable. Nothing yet on the official site, but we’re sure that Seagate will be taking orders soon for its latest HDD.