News Seagate promises 6TB drives this year

Damn

 

Grrrr. Not mad at the uber high price, mad that these are still stinking 1TB per platter designs. It does make me wonder though, if they have 1, 2, 3 and 4 platter designs and are looking at a 6 platter 6TB design, what about also coming out with a 5TB 5 platter design more consumer oriented?

Sigh, even a slight bump to 1.2TB per platter would go a long way. ~2.5TB 2 platter design, ~5TB 4 platter and 6TB 5 platter designs then.

It seems like hard drive areal density is plateauing a lot recently. It's been, what? 18 months, at least, since 1TB per platter designs hit and by the admissions of both WD/HGST and Seagate it doesn't look like either of them will release designs with >1TB per platter in 2014. So a minimum of another 12 months, or 2.5+ years before we move from 1TB per platter to something higher.

SSDs are catching up, fast. I'll bet we'll see some 1.5TB designs this year as the big guys start moving from designs like 19x25nm cells to 19x19nm cells and stuff and in another year or two we'll probably see 2+TB SSD designs (in a 2.5" form factor to be clear).

 

I hope they are reliable, Seagate doesn't have a good history but it seems they are making some progress.
http://arstechnica.com/information-...ty-to-the-test-shows-not-all-disks-are-equal/

 

As far as I know, the 6TB He drives aren't even available through normal channels yet.

I'm not in any rush, but I wouldn't mind a couple for backup purposes if the price was reasonable.

 

Great another useless use for Helium.

 

Might want to consider this http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6...bility-myth-the-real-story-covered/index.html as well.

Sounds like that data may not be very reliable at all.

 

It results in electricity saving so surely positive given how little gas is needed to a fill a 3.5" drive.

 

Perhaps, but not exactly a long-term solution.....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19676639

 

If they can keep helium in - which is difficult, since it diffuses through objects quite easily, as every balloon-owner knows - they could probably just as easily maintain a vacuum in there.

Gimmick.

 

Perhaps. But it is data. I think the cold harsh truth is the real data is going to be hard to come by. It would rely on companies being honest and open. This includes too many companies reliant on third parties maintaining their hardware also. I can't see much incentive for anyone to do anything other than avoid actually **** products.

 

That was a good article - thanks for the share.

 

Hitachi's 3.5" division is actually owned by Toshiba now, not Western Digital.

WD got Hitachi's laptop HDD division, the desktop division went to Toshiba as a regulatory compliance clause to avoid consolidating all HDD manufacture into two companies.