Seagates LaCie touts a 25TB not a typo box o disks for your DESK • The Register

Seagate subsidiary LaCie has launched a set of external storage boxes using a 5TB Seagate hard drive – even though disk maker Seagate hasn’t officially launched a 5TB part.

via Seagates LaCie touts a 25TB not a typo box o disks for your DESK • The Register.

There isn’t a whole lot in the way of activity when it comes to new designs and advances in spinning magnetic hard drives these days. The capacity wars have plateau’d around 4TB or so. The next big threshold to cross is either Shingled recording or HAMR (which uses a laser to heat the surface just prior to a write being committed to the disk). Due to the technical advances required and the adoption by a slightly smaller field of manufacturers (there’s not as many here as there was a while ago) the speed at which higher density devices hit the market has slowed. We saw 1TB and 2TB quickly show up one after the other, but slowly eventually the 3TB and 4TB drives followed. And usually they were priced at the high end premium part of the market. Now Seagate has stitched together a 5TB drive and LaCie is rushing it into a number of its own desktop and pro-sumer level products.

The assumption for now is Seagate has adopted the shingled recording method (which folds writing of blocks of data in an overlapping pattern to increase the density). We’ll see how well that design decision performs over the coming months as the early adopters and fanbois needing each and every last terabyte of storage they can get for their game roms, warez and film/music collections.

Related articles

• How Shingled Magnetic Recording Could Revolutionize Data Storage
• Seagate’s HAMR Technology Poised to Power a 20 TB HDD by 2020

• Seagate’s LaCie touts a 25TB (not a typo) box o’ disks for your DESK (go.theregister.com)
• LaCie’s External Drive Lineup Gains New 5TB Drives from Seagate [Mac Blog] (macrumors.com)