Just when you thought that you still had loads of room on the 1TB of storage in your PC or Mac, another holiday season comes around and tempts you to capture all the antics at the office party in multi-megapixel clarity, or record high definition movies of loved ones as they excitedly rip through reams and reams of wrapping paper. Suddenly your monster hard drive starts to look somewhat elf-like. Hitachi GST (Global Storage Technologies) has unveiled two new hard disk storage solutions of gargantuan capacity that may well help to alleviate some of those storage woes. Both center around the same 4TB Deskstar 5K4000 HDD - with one being prepped for internal use, and the other given a nice outer jacket and USB 3.0 connectivity.
The new internal storage offering comes in the form of the 3.5-inch form factor Deskstar 5K4000 Internal Hard Drive Kit. Hitachi GST says that the new drive incorporates the company's CoolSpin technology to help keep power consumption down, and uses almost 30 percent less power than its own Deskstar 7K3000 drives as a result. It also benefits from very quiet operation, with an idle noise level of just 2.5 bels (which is about the same as the whisper-quiet Seagate Barracuda eco-friendly HDD featured last year). Additionally, the 5K4000 uses Hitachi's Advanced Format technology, which increases the sector size on the hard disk drive from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes for increased capacities and improved error correction.
The drive kit is reported to be currently shipping to online and retail stores in limited quantities for a suggested retail price of US$399.99, and includes mounting screws, a free download to allow 32- and 64-bit Windows, OS X and Linux systems to utilize the massive storage on offer as one big drive, and some walk-through set up instructions. The 5K4000 will be made available to system manufacturers worldwide from Q1 2012.
For its second monster storage solution, Hitachi has placed the aforementioned Deskstar 5K4000 inside a textured black casing and introduced it as a new member of the Touro Desk External Hard Drive range. The 4TB Touro benefits from a fast USB 3.0 interface and is both Mac and PC compatible. It's also bundled with 3GB of free cloud storage just in case the colossal amount of desktop storage supplied by the unit isn't enough or, more usefully perhaps, you need to easily access some files while out and about.
The 4TB Tour Desk will be available from January next year for a suggested retail price of US$419.99.
