Seagate coming soon with 6TB drive

Seagate will launch a new hard drive with a storage capacity of 6TB early next quarter. The drive will consist of six platters of one terabyte each, while Western Digitals Hitachi’s competing 6TB drive consists of seven platters.

Seagate already releases HDDs with 1TB platters and with the upcoming HDD for the higher segment, the manufacturer will place six of those platters in a single housing for the first time. Seagate did not give details yet when discussing the quarterly figures for its 6TB drive.

The company did make more announcements. For example, Seagate will use its SMR technology for several drives that will be released in the coming months. With this technique, the storage density can be increased by using slightly overlapping data areas. With SMR, the possibility to increase the data density by 25 percent comes within reach, which in practice results in an increase from 1TB to 1.25TB per platter.

In addition, the manufacturer says it continues to invest in its hamr technology. Seagate wants to use this technology for high-capacity drives this year, which makes smaller magnetic domains and therefore higher storage capacities possible, but Seagate has not yet made any concrete announcements. The HDD manufacturer does expect that the average storage capacity per delivered drive will exceed 1TB this year.

Western Digital was ahead of Seagate with the introduction of 6TB. WD’s HGST He6 drives are filled with helium to reduce heat build-up from air resistance in the housing.