Hitachi ships the world's first 4 Tbyte drive (quietly)

[amirm]

A bit of good news in what has become a very gloomy situation with the floods in Thailand taking out Western Digital manufacturing plans and with it, causing shortages and sharp increase in drive costs:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5214/hitachi-ships-the-first-4tb-hard-drives

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Hitachi has started shipping the world's first hard drive with 4TB capacity. There has not been an official press release from Hitachi yet, but a Japanese site Akiba has spotted the hard drive on sale. The hard drive carries model number HDS5C4040ALE630 and is branded as Deskstar 5K.

The brand suggests that it's a lower performance drive with rotational speed of 5900rpm (Hitachi calls this "CoolSpin"). The drive comes with 32MB of cache just like the 2TB and 3TB versions, and uses SATA 6Gb/s interface. The drive is priced at 26,800 Yen, which translates to $345. For comparison, the 3TB Deskstar 5K costs 19,780 Yen ($254), so the price per GB is very close. The drive appears to use four platters, so one more platter than the previous 3TB monster.

The release comes at an odd time because hard drive supply is still very limited due to the floods in Thailand. The components of this drive are manufactured in Thailand according to the product packaging, meaning that the supply may be very limited in the short term. There is no word on global availability, though.

 

[FrantzM]

A case for Hi-Rez Audio ???

 

[Ron Party]

I'll pass. I'm waiting on 1+TB SSDs.

 

[Bruce B]

This is great for someone like me and all those studios that back-up TB of data. I just installed a 12TB NAS and soon ran out of room. Was thinking of replacing all the drives with 3TB and now 4TB comes along. Cool!

 

[Bruce B]

I'll pass. I'm waiting on 1+TB SSDs.

I've got a couple installed now!!

OCZ Velodrive

 

[Ron Party]

Ha! Bruce, I should have added "at a friendly price".

 

[microstrip]

I've got a couple installed now!!

OCZ Velodrive

Do you really need 900~1000MB/s read/write speeds?
It seems you can move a CD image file in less than 2 seconds!

 

[Bruce B]

Do you really need 900~1000MB/s read/write speeds?
It seems you can move a CD image file in less than 2 seconds!

When you're viewing/editing RAW uncompressed video, yes. These movie files can be hundreds of gigs!
They're in a Mac Pro running Final Cut

 

[Mark (Basspig) Weiss]

Oh great. Now we can lose up to 4 terabytes of data in one HD failure. I'll pass..

 

[amirm]

Well, you can also use one to back up four 1 TByte drives .

 

[Mark (Basspig) Weiss]

Well, you can also use one to back up four 1 TByte drives .

And lose FOUR backups with one HDD failure. LOL...

What's also scary is that SSD drives are no more reliable than this. Just look at the comments on Newegg's sales of SSDs.. not very encouraging.

 

[amirm]

I will write in the future about flash memory. But most people would be shocked to hear that the total number of write operations to a piece of flash these days can be as low as 5,000 before it fails! Indeed, flash media is much less archival than hard disk. It is fast but pretty unreliable as storage goes. Lots of tricks are used to hide that from consumer hence the reason the perception is the opposite.

 

[carolkoh]

People actually store stuff on flash drives? I've always viewed them as temporary storage.

 

[amirm]

People actually store stuff on flash drives? I've always viewed them as temporary storage.

My laptop has a 256 Gigabyte "SSD" flash drive so everything I have is stored on flash . But I back it up often to my server and my email inbox.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

People actually store stuff on flash drives? I've always viewed them as temporary storage.

SSD is flash memory, and only make sense, in my view, in super portable devices that can't handle the weight or volatility of a hard drive.

Tim

 

[Mark (Basspig) Weiss]

I've had both good and bad experiences with flash media. Back in 2001, I was using SmartMedia cards in my first digital camera, and had 3 of them suddenly become unreadable. They could not be formatted again, and had to be sent to SanDisk for warranty replacement. Three times.

Since 2008, I have been using Sony SxS flash media for HD video acquisition. Much heavier duty application. So far, never lost any data and never had a card fail. But they cost an absurd amount of money.