Seagate has reportedly begun shipping the hard drive industry’s first 4TB drives that use 1TB platters. These new 4TB drives from the hard drive giant Seagate will reportedly get slotted into the companies Barracuda series of drives, in the 7200.15 segment.

These drives provide 4000GB of unformatted hard drive capacity and a 7200 RPM spindle speed meaning they have been optimised for performance not energy saving. The buffer size is 64MB and the drives use a SATA III 6 Gb/s interface even though you’ll be able to use them on a SATA II 3 Gb/s interface without any significant performance drop-offs.

Early indications of performance suggest burst speeds as high as 146 MB/s and the SATA III interface supposedly allows faster buffer-to-host burst speeds. Seagate claims 365% less power consumption than the competition too. The product should arrive at stores very soon with the OEM version expected to retail for $190 USD. The boxed/retail version will go for $212 with the only difference being a retail box, cables and documentation plus possibly a longer warranty.

Seagate is claiming the lowest price per GB of any storage device in the industry. It is also worth noting that 1TB per platter technology means Seagate will be able to offer 5 platter 5000GB/5TB drives in the not-so-distant future.

What are your thoughts on 4TB drives? Will you be buying one? Is $190 a fair price in your opinion? Would you rather wait for Western Digital to release their equivalent 1TB platter 4TB drives? Or just buy the current 4TB drives that are already on the market based off five 800GB platters? Let us know what you think.

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