Seagate ships 4TB Desktop HDD

Seagate announced today the shipment of its 4TB Desktop HDD 3.5-inch internal hard drive for general consumers. While this is not the first 4TB hard drive on the market, the company says it's the first that uses the 1TB-per-platter design. Basically, on the inside, the Desktop HDD comes with four platters (disks), each offering 1TB of storage space.

The Desktop HDD is also the first desktop internal drive from Seagate that uses the new streamlined naming convention. Seagate's consumer-grade hard drives were formerly called Barracuda. Earlier this year, the company also shipped the first hybrid drive of the same naming scheme, the Laptop Thin SSHD.

The new Desktop HDD comes with 64MB of cache memory and supports the latest SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard. It also works with previous versions of SATA, including SATA 2 (3Gbps) and SATA (1.5Gbps). Unlike the previous Barracuda drives that spun at 7,200rpm, the new Desktop HDD spins at only 5,900rpm and consumes about 35 percent less energy. Seagate says that the drive will still offer fast performance with the sustained writing speed of about 145MBps.

According to Seagate, the new drive is designed for both desktop computers and external storage solutions, such as NAS servers or external hard drives. Generally, hard drives of 2TB or larger require a modern operating system (Windows 7 or later) and UEFI BIOS to work, but the Desktop HDD comes with DiskWizard software that allows it to work with Windows XP. To use it as a boot drive, however, UEFI BIOS is needed.

To put things in perspective, 4TB is equivalent to about 500 hours of HD video, 1 million MP3 songs, or 800,000 digital photos. The 4TB Desktop HDD is about 800,000 times larger in capacity than the first desktop hard drive Seagate introduced back in 1979, but the physical size has remained about the same.

The 4TB Desktop HDD is available now and costs about $190, which is much lower than its competitors.