Hitachi has started shipping and selling their new 4TB Deskstar 5K hard disk drive, making it the first in the world to ship drives this big. The new disk sports a speed of 5,900RPM, a 6Gbps SATA 3 interface, and the same 32MB of cache as its 2 and 3TB siblings.

The list price is around $345. More info is available on Hitachi's site http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-d...eskstar-5k4000

In other disk news, a recent advance in platter data density means we will soon start seeing up to 6TB of disk space per platter. Its possible to get 5 platters into a 3.5" drive, which means that by this time next year we may be seeing 30TB single drives!