This is undoubtedly making desktop storage device companies a little nervous: internal hard drives for desktops and laptops that keep moving up to larger and larger capacities, so that buying an extra portable drive seems like storage overkill.
With this in mind, it’s Hitachi Global Storage Technologies’ turn to lead the world in terms of capacity for spinning-disk drives. The company Dec. 12 came out with the most-spacious-yet HDD for consumer use, the 4TB Deskstar 5K4000 Internal Hard Drive Kit and the Touro Desk External Hard Drive.
The 4TB Deskstar 5K4000 is a 3.5-inch hard drive with a 32MB cache buffer. It features 28 percent idle power savings over Deskstar 7K3000 7,200 rpm drives and an idle acoustic level of only 2.5 bels.
The new drive is now shipping in limited quantities to online and retail stores with a suggested retail price of $400, Hitachi said.
The pricing here may be a deterrent for some people at this point, because one can pick up a 1TB desktop storage device for under $100 in a lot of places–and 2TB machines for not much more than that.
We hesitate to use the word “cheap,” but let’s face it, these things just are.
