Toshiba pushes out 5TB spinner for cloudy types Toshiba has produced a 5TB 3.5-inch disk drive for bulk storage and cloud-based workloads, its second 5TB drive (the first came out in February). The MC series drive seems to be based on its 5TB MG04 and shares the same 6Gbit/s SATA interface, 7,200rpm spin speed and 2TB, 3TB, 4BH and 5TB capacity points, using 1TB platters. …
You won't be allowed to have them. You must store your data in "the cloud" like a good little consumer-robot, where it can be monitored and controlled for your own good, and where you can be constantly milked for money in order to keep access to it, and where your usage can be "monetized", and where it can be "revised" if it is copyrighted, too contentious or politically incorrect.
3-4 TB is the biggest you'll ever be allowed to have, and chances are those won't be available as consumer models for long. Already I've noticed that my local computer shop doesn't stock anything over 2 TB any more; if you want bigger you have to order it in - at a premium, of course. But all their new PC's now come with Windows 8 - and cloud storage by default.
You will comply. You won't be given the choice.
The fact that your local computer shop doesn't stock drives over 2TB says more about the nature of high street component shops and bricks&mortar retail than it does about the availability of hard disks.
Looking at a couple of my preferred online stockists they have half a dozen or more 4TB 3.5" models in stock right now.
Bullshit.
No-one walks into a computer store and asks for a 4tb drive, that's why we don't stock them. Simple as that, they are dead stock that won't rotate.
Guess what, bricks and mortar stores have operational costs, and five £200+ drives sitting around doing nothing are nothing but dead weight.
That's why we don't stock 4tb drives - no-one on the street wants them - especially as people like you will buy them off the internet if you can get them £3 cheaper.
Tit.
"No-one walks into a computer store and asks for a 4tb drive, that's why we don't stock them. Simple as that, they are dead stock that won't rotate."
err... <looks at two 4TB USB3 externals, one plugged into Mac mini, one plugged into hand-built Win7 box, both purchased from local computer stores> Y'all _sure_ about that? As my old 750GB/1TB/1.5TB externals (mostly USB2, some FireWire 800) fill up I'm replacing them with 4TB drives. (They're usually close to EoL by the time I replace them, anyway.) The unit on the Mac replaced a 1.5TB drive serving as a Time Machine backup drive which had filled up and TM was killing older backups to generate space. It'll take a while to fill 4TB. The unit on the Win7 replaced a 1TB drive which had, among other things, an ISO for every major piece of software I have (Mac, Windows...) including OS installs and patches. Given the size of recent Mac and Windows OS installs, it was filling up alarmingly quickly. Again, 4TB should be sufficient for some time to come.
I picked both drives up off the shelf at <name of store redacted>; they had a bunch of 1, 1.5, 2, 3, and 4 TB external USB 2 and 3, and internal SATA 2 and 3, mostly 3, drives along the rear wall and seem to be moving 'em fairly briskly. They had two cashiers in the front with a total of five customers, including me, and two customers with 4TB drives, including me. (The other guy bought an internal.) Given the pricing, the ones which aren't moving anymore are the smaller drives.
You see WD bought the hard drive business from Hitachi but weren't allowed to keep all of it so half of it went to Toshiba and the other half went to WD where it is now called HGST so HGST drives are either WD drives branded as HGST or Hitachi drives manufactured by WD branded as HGST. Toshiba drives might be Hitachi drives manufactured by Toshiba branded Toshiba or they might be Toshiba drives.
My main concern is that such large data densities are more likely to fail due to EMP, which in this politically charged climate of mutually assured destruction is bad.
I read somewhere that with the GMR heads, the shielding on the drive isn't adequate to protect against even a nearby lightning strike with the drive unplugged, just the induced current in building structure can be enough to fry it.
EMPs can be 10-1000 times more intense and also nearby wiring can act as a pickup antenna.
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