Seagate will release a new hard disk drive (HDD) with a capacity of 6TB in the second quarter of this year. The drive consists of six platter of a terabyte each. A competing drive from Western Digital Hitachi consists of seven platters.
Seagate already has 1 TB platter drives for the high end market but these new drives are the first where the company was able to fit six of those platters in a single drive. Seagate mentioned the HDD in the presentation of its financial results.
During the presentation Seagate also announced it will release more HDDs using its SMR technology. With this technology the data density is increased by overlapping data areas. With SMR it's possible to increase the data density with almost 25%, which in practice results in platters of 1.25 TB instead of 1 TB with current technology.
Besides investment in the new SMR technology, the company also continues to invest in its HAMR technology. This technology uses less space per bit to storage and thus makes higher data density possibility. Seagate also hopes to use this technology for higher capacity drives. The company expects that the average capacity of HDDs will exceed the 1 TB this year.
Western Digital beat Seagate in the race for the first 6 TB HDD. The He6 drives from WD are helium filled to decrease heat by air resistance. We previously revealed a roadmap in which Seagate showed it would release a 5 TB and 6 TB drives.
