A spokeswoman for Samsung Electronics said Wednesday that the consumer and IT company did not unveil a 4TB hard disk drive (HDD) at CeBIT trade-show earlier this month. The representative for the firm said that the firm only revealed technical possibility to make such a drive.

"Samsung never presented a 4 TB hard drive on CeBIT exhibition. We really don't know where this information comes from. We only showed a 2 TB HDD with 1 TB per platter. Samsung will be able to produce  4 TB hard drives in the future. But there is no product like this existmng," said Doerte Gensow, a spokeswoman for Samsung in Germany.

It was reported on Tuesday that Samsung had  show off the industry's first 4TB hard drive that belonged to Spinpoint EcoGreen F6 family of hard drives and had 5200rpm spindle speed. The HDD used Serial ATA-600 interface and has 32MB of cache.

The drive, which was shown was marked as HN-D201RAE. The lack of "4" in the model number may indicated that the HDD was not of 4TB capacity. Nonetheless, it was definitely based on based on the sixth-generation PMR platters with ~630Gb/inch² areal density or higher.

HDDs based on latest-gen PMR platters are already available; for example, single-platter Hitachi Travelstar Z5K500 500GB 2.5" drive has been shipping for some time now; hence, the technology for 4TB desktop HDDs is here.

In late 2010 an analyst predicted availability of 4TB desktop hard drives based on 1TB platters this calendar year. However, some believe that certain companies will introduce 4TB drives based on five platters in order to avoid usage of newer technology.

Given the fact that only newer computers will be compatible with hard drives larger than 2.2TBs, the upgrade market of hard disk drives will likely stagnate a bit next year as fewer consumers will be interested in top-of-the-range HDDs. As a result, it is unlikely that manufacturers will attempt to deliver high capacity points at any cost.

Tags: Samsung, HDD, Spinpoint, EcoGreen