Seagate Mass producing 5TB HDDs

Seagate has tried its hardest to shrink the read/write heads of hard drives even further, but with the latest 1 TB 3.5-inch platters, the company believes they've hit a physical brick wall: the head simply can't get any smaller. The same goes for the tracks on the platters, which Seagate claims are as close together as physically possible.

Seagate completes acquisition of Samsung's hard drive division

In April, Seagate agreed to purchase Samsung's hard drive division in a transaction valued at $1.4 billion. Technically speaking, the acquisition is complete and Seagate has launched a web pagededicated to the purchase for customers. Logistically speaking though, the companies have their work cut out for them as they restructure and combine their products, resources and talent.

Currently, Seagate is providing mechanical hard drives for Samsung PCs while Samsung is returning the favor with flash chips used in Seagate's enterprise SSDs and consumer hybrids (ie. Momentus XT).

As a result of the deal, both companies have extended and improved an existing patent agreement allowing them to dip into each other's R&D efforts. Also, Seagate will be gaining significant inroads to customers in China, South East Asia, Brazil, Germany and Russia. In addition to patents and distribution, Samsung will also be appointing a nominee who will join Seagate's executive board of directors.

Samsung's current HDD product line-up will also be Seagate's property. This includes Spinpoint M8, MP4 and S3 portable products. While it is uncertain if Seagate will choose to retain any products from Samsung's meager production portfolio, the Samsung brand name will live on for the next 12 months as per the agreement.

This latest acquisition seems to be yet another nail in the coffin for mechanical hard drive manufacturers as they continue to reduce down into just a handful of companies. Incidentally, Western Digital is still working on its own acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. If the merger completes next year like WD believes, there will be only three major HDD manufacturers left in the world: Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba.

Hitachi GST ships two new 4TB Deskstar-based disks

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announced on Monday that it has begun shipping 4TB desktop mechanical hard disks targeted at consumer PCs. This follows on from Seagate announcing it was releasing its own 4TB disks back in September.

The Deskstar 5K4000 (PDF) is a 3.5" form factor mechanical hard disk with a 32-megabyte cache buffer. It uses the SATA 3 6Gb/s interface, and offers a maximum areal density of 443 Gbits per square inch. The spindle speed was not published but it will likely be 5,900rpm. Also bundled is 3GB of free online cloud storage.

Hitachi GST's CoolSpin technology is also featured in the new drives, with the company stating it will offer decreased power consumption without affecting the disks' overall performance. Compared to its 7K3000 3TB unit, it offers a 28% reduction in idle power consumption. Joining that is the firm's Advanced Format feature, which increases the sector size from 512-bytes to 4096-bytes (4KB), which in turn boosts capacity and offers improvements to error correcting capabilities.

The 4TB disk will initially ship in small numbers packaged as a retail version with a price of $400. Included will be mounting screws, full instructions and drivers covering most popular operating systems in order to take advantage of the massive capacity of the disks without further hardware upgrades. A "bare" OEM drive version will arrive in the hands of OEMs and other partners around the first quarter of 2012.

The company also announced that its Touro Desk external drive will be available in January with the new 4TB capacity, in addition to its existing 3TB, 2TB and 1TB variants. The new 4TB disk model will only be available with an USB 3.0 interface, whereas the rest of the range is available in a USB 2.0 version as well. Given the size of the disk, it is understandable that they chose the newer, faster connectivity option, especially as it is becoming more commonplace on computers. The suggested retail price for that unit will be $419.99.