Seagate will follow the footsteps of Western Digital by releasing its first 3.5 inches 5TB Hard Disk Drive series in February 2014. Western Digital which promised that it is going to come up with its 5TB drives by the end of this year is busy in making its word true. News is out from reliable sources that WD will keep its word and will release its new HDD with 5TB capacity as a New Year gift.
So, Seagate technology will be the second company to launch 3.5 inches 5 platter hard drive with 5TB capacity next year. These hard drives are expected to offer 50% more capacity and will be based on the standard PMR technology.
According to Digitimes reports, HGST, a subsidiary of WD is planning to commercially release its Helium driven drives with 6TB capacity by second quarter of next year. HGST released around 800 drives to be tried and tested on various platforms a few weeks ago and Netflix openly confessed that it was using this new model in one of its storage solutions. Since, the testing yielded encouraging results, HGST has started the production in its Singapore manufacturing plant from this month, in order to make its HGST Ultrastar He6 drives available to the commercial market by next year.
Coming to Seagate’s 5TB drives, the company has already cleared the air that it has no intentions to introduce Helium based drives to the storage market in near future. Instead, the hard drive maker will stick to Shingle Magnetic Recording (SMR) and later Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technologies.
So, in coming days, it is confirmed that HGST will surely dominate the helium filled hard disk drives market for a good period of time due to less competition. So, for all those users who want to jump on HDDs with highest capacity, HGST Ultrastar He6 will be a good option to rely on, provided the price factor is not a concerning issue to them.
Latest Update- On Seagate 6TB drives– Updated in Feb 2014
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