nice, it was about time to have some more choices after the later buyouts between the HDD companies.

Why only 3TB? Hitachi had a 4TB HDD for sale starting more than 9 months ago. Now neither Western Digital nor Toshiba is offering a 4TB internal HDD? What is going on?

4 TB is still pretty new technology. Generally Hitachi goes out of its way to set the precedence on the next size before you'll see any other the vendors do it. Hitachi probably created a fatter drive to fit another platter; generally Seagate and WD wait until they can fit 4TB into more common spec.

Also, it's 4 TB; I expect that the 3TBs are overstocked since I didn't see much of a change in price during the floods. I expect the major manufacturers will try to work down their stock before worrying about 4TB. As for why Toshiba isn't doing it with their new line: they've only had those factories for less than a year, I bet they're trying to justify the cost of the purchase with production.

What ever happened to this?
http://www.reghardware.co.../04/hitachi_5tb_hdd_2010/

They pledged it man, they freakin pledged it!!

loadwick:

Interesting article. Apparently Hitachi's previous claim was 4TB by 2011. They actually met that one -- HGST's 4TB drive was available in Dec. 2011.

But with HGST swallowed up, it seems we will be lucky to see a 4TB drive from WD, Seagate, or Toshiba by Dec. 2012.

If HGST were still independent, I guess we would have 5TB drives already. HGST made 5-platter HDDs (the 4TB had 5 x 800GB platters). Now that 1TB platters are common, I guess HGST would have already released a 5-platter 5TB HDD.