Seagate announces 4TB GoFlex Desk external hard drive

[Jos]

Seagate today announced a 4TB variant of its GoFlex Desk external hard drive, touting it as the highest capacity single-volume external storage device on the market. The company is not saying how many platters are inside the new drive but considering it has already announced 1TB per platter drives, we're assuming they went with four platters with an areal density of 625Gb/s per square inch.

They aren't mentioning spindle speed or cache size, either. What they do mention is that the GoFlex Desk will ship with support for USB 2.0 and USB 3.0, while a Mac version shipping later this month will offer USB 2.0 and FireWire compatibility. The company’s GoFlex Desk for Mac hard drive offers similar features but comes pre-formatted in the HFS+ format.

Like other members of the GoFlex Family, the GoFlex Desk allows users to change adapters to work with a range of interfaces (USB, FireWire, eSATA), and apparently a Thunderbolt update could be on the way.

Seagate is also introducing a new design that will become standard across the entire GoFlex line by the end of the month. Although the company mentions that the GoFlex Desk's new design should leave "a smaller footprint," this external drive still weights 2.93 pounds and includes a power supply cord, so naturally it doesn't quite qualify as portable.

The GoFlex Desk is retailing for $250 on Seagate's website and comes with a two year warranty.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/45381-seagate-announces-4tb-goflex-desk-external-hard-drive.html

 

[codefeenix]

7200RPM, 32MB Cache.

 

[Greg S]

I'd rather get two 2tb drives and just move around two and save myself about $70.

 

[gwailo247]

One, day, maybe 5 years, maybe 10 years from now, I'll be faced with the daunting task of ripping thousands of DVDs back onto some crazy 50 or 100 TB hard drive.

 

[Guest]

Athough it's great that it can store so much, what if the drive suddenly fails? There goes 4 TB of data... I don't usually have enough money right away to buy two drives for backup but even if I do, I felt safer if I buy a bunch of 1.5 TB (the max I think) since if any of it fails, I only lose 1.5 TB of data and since it's also decently small, I can still manage to back it up somehow. But wow... 4 TB is just awesome...

 

[Guest]

It is a 5-platter, 7200RPM drive with 64MB cache. Source: Anandtceh

--
Now I wonder how hot it will run ,probably over 50 C constantly? When will Seagate ever learn how to make a proper external enclosure. I Remember their 5 platter, 3TB drive ran very very hot in their Desk external enclosure

 

[Steve]

Win7Dev said:
I'd rather get two 2tb drives and just move around two and save myself about $70.

That's because this product is not aimed at you. It is more targeted towards power users that cannot get their hands on enough storage. Users with NAS devices that can no longer support more hard drives for example.

Guest said:
Athough it's great that it can store so much, what if the drive suddenly fails? There goes 4 TB of data... I don't usually have enough money right away to buy two drives for backup but even if I do, I felt safer if I buy a bunch of 1.5 TB (the max I think) since if any of it fails, I only lose 1.5 TB of data and since it's also decently small, I can still manage to back it up somehow. But wow... 4 TB is just awesome...

They call it backing up. If you have a 1TB hard drive you need another 1TB hard drive to back it up, assuming you want to save all the date. The solution for larger 4TB drives remains the same, you get two. Or you use technology such as RAID1,5,6...

 

[Guest]

Why would one elect to waste desk space with an HDD contained within its own cute little housing?


The only two applications that I can readily envision are those in which a person needs to move extremely large amounts of data from one geographical location to another much faster than can be achieved via internet transmission, and/or one needs to move extremely large amounts of data that are extremely sensitive in nature and must therefore be transported in person.

Any other application--boot drives, storage, backup/archival, network drives, movement of data between computers within a building, movement of data between geographical locations, etc--can be handled with 'thumb' drives, or a network combined with internally mounted drives in either desktop, laptop, or rackmount configurations.

That is, unless I have no idea what I am talking about--which is entirely possible, but improbable.

 

[SKYSTAR]

oh man that's too big