Although Seagate is a large hard drive maker the company has been lagging behind in capacity when it comes to the competition. The pain is further exacerbated by the fact that the small Western Digital subsidiary HGST has been offering 3.5-inch hard drives with 6 TB of capacity for quite some time with Seagate having nothing to counter this WD product.
Now the company has officially announced that it plans a new 6 TB hard disk drive to be released as late as April 2014. Seagate did not share a whole lot of information on its upcoming product saying just that it is going to be an enterprise-class hard drive.
“We are continuing to expand our offering of high capacity drives with our six-disk, 6 TB drive shipping early next quarter,” said Steve Luczo, chairman and chief executive of Seagate.
It is also not clear if the new Seagate hard drive will come filled with helium which is the case with HGST’s 6 TB drives. Helium has turned into the latest innovation when it comes to hard drives offering a few important advantages when compared to regular drives such as lowered power consumption, lower drag force, more platters and lower overall disk temperature. Thus up to 7 platters can be installed in 3.5-inch drives potentially driving capacity to the insane 7-7.5 TB.
The only thing that is known as of now is that the upcoming Seagate drive will include six 1 TB platters on the proven PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording technology). No word on helium about this one though.
Source: Seagate