Seagate's amazing technological HD breakthrough?

[steve51245]

So last a year a number of news articles were released about an amazing seagate hard disk breakthrough where "Seagate has demonstrated the first terabit-per-square-inch hard drive, almost doubling the areal density found in modern hard drives" resulting in 2TB 2.5" drives and 6TB 3.5" drives in being released by Seagate 2014.

Now in 2014 it will be 2 years since western digital released 2TB 2.5" drives, so how does an amazing technological breakthrough only allow Seagate to regain parity with western digital 2 years later? Am I missing something?

Surely doubling the density would allow Seagate to release 3-4TB 2.5" unless western digital did something amazing that Seagate can't replicate?

 

[fzabkar]

WD's 2.5" 2TB drives use 4 platters. Maybe Seagate is sticking to 2 platters for their laptop drives??

http://www.storagereview.com/2tb_western_digital_my_passport_portable_hard_drive_review

 

[steve51245]

Oh I see thanks, I don't get why seagate didn't release their own 4 platter drives instead of letting western digital curb stomp them on the external HD market due to their HDs having double the capacity.

Supposedly samsung had 1TB platters back in 2011 but their drives are not of higher capacity than anyone elses for some reason.

 

[fzabkar]

1TB per platter for a 3.5" drive has been the norm for a while, but I doubt that any HDD manufacturer was shipping 2.5" drives with that kind of data density. That would require twice as many gigabits per square inch.

In fact you could verify the actual data density by comparing the maximum sustained transfer rate in HD Tune benchmarks. 1TB platters spinning at the same speed as 500GB platters would have a transfer rate which is about 40% faster.