Last week, Hitachi Global Storage Division(acquired by Western Digital, closing in 4Q2011) and Seagate announced some higher capacity disk drives for desk top applications over the past week.
Most of us in the industry have become somewhat jaded with respect to new capacity offerings. But last weeks announcements may give one pause.
Hitachi announced that they are shipping over 1TB/disk platter using 3.5″ platters shipping with 569Gb/sqin technology. In the past 4-6 platter disk drives were available in shipped disk drives using full height, 3.5″ drives. Given the platter capacity available now, 4-6TB drives are certainly feasible or just around the corner. Both Seagate and Samsung beat HGST to 1TB platter capacities which they announced in May of this year and began shipping in drives in June.
Speaking of 4TB drives, Seagate announced a new 4TB desktop external disk drive. I couldn’t locate any information about the number of platters, or Gb/sqin of their technology, but 4 platters are certainly feasible and as a result, a 4TB disk drive is available today.
I don’t know about you, but 4TB disk drives for a desktop seem about as much as I could ever use. But when looking seriously at my desktop environment my CAGR for storage (revealed as fully compressed TAR files) is ~61% year over year. At that rate, I will need a 4TB drive for backup purposes in about 7 years and if I assume a 2X compression rate then a 4TB desktop drive will be needed in ~3.5 years, (darn music, movies, photos, …). And we are not heavy digital media consumers, others that shoot and edit their own video probably use orders of magnitude more storage.
Hard to believe, but given current trends inevitable, a 4TB disk drive will become a necessity for us within the next 4 years.
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