Seagate said today that it's preparing to ship to retailers a 4TB external hard drive that represents the highest capacity single-drive product in the industry.

The 4TB GoFlex Desk drive will retail for $249.99 and is expected to be available through online retailers within the month. The new drive will be able to hold 2,000 high-definition movies or about one million .mp3 music files.

The new GoFlex Desk sports a new slimmer design for the GoFlex product line

The drive is the latest in the GoFlex product family launched last year. The new GoFlex Desk represents the line's first redesign, and it features a sharper "industrial look" with a smaller footprint. The entire line of GoFlex drives will adopt the new industrial design over the next few weeks.

For Windows machines, the new drive uses a SATA to USB 3.0 (5Gbit/sec) adapter.

The adapter that also features an illuminated gauge to display available space on the drive

The GoFlex Desk for Mac external drive features both FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 and will be available in Apple stores by the end of the month.

Seagate said in a statement that with USB 3.0 still maturing and Apple now pushing Thunderbolt I/O technology, the adapter made more sense for use with existing desktops and laptops.

The GoFlex Desk comes with pre-loaded backup software that provides automatic, continuous back-ups with encryption for all stored files.

"Yet another industry first for Seagate, we have reached a new high-capacity in the 3.5-inch hard drive form factor," Patrick Connolly, general manager of retail products for Seagate, said in a statement.

The GoFlex drives are Windows and Mac OS X compatible and have the flexibility to go between both operating systems. In addition to cross-platform compatibility, the GoFlex Desk drive can also be utilized with the GoFlex Home adapter if an owner chooses to use it as a network drive.

Network World's Keith Shaw opens up the new 4TB GoFlex Desk external hard drive from Seagate and tries to explain how much storage space 4TB represents through the power of small chocolate candies.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.