when will 6TB or 8TB portable hard drive be available?

Now as far as I know the largest capacity of portable hard drive (not desktop hard drive) is 5TB

will 6TB or 8TB portable hard drive be put to the market in the near future?

 

I have not heard of anything and believe me, I am still waiting, 4 years now, anything larger than 2tb in a 9.5mm or thinner size.

 

ha, ive asked that myself to be honest

so far, max capacity 2.5 inch HDDs had the following release dates:

external / internal
1 TB = 2009 / 2010
1.5 TB = 2011 / 2012
2 TB = 2012 / 2012
3 TB = 2014 / 2016
4 TB = 2014 / 2016
5 TB = 2016 / 2016

as you can see, external 2.5" HDDs are available way earlier than internal ones. extrapolating from this history, we have an average of 1.75 years for the release of higher capacity external HDDs and 3 years for the release of higher capacity internal HDDs.

so my guess: 6 TB external HDD available at end of 2018 / beginning of 2019 and 6 TB internal HDD available sometime in 2019/2020, maybe even later...

 

That's probably because it's OK to put 12.5mm or thicker drives into external units and these have more platters. Most notebooks won't hold drives thicker than 7mm or 9.5mm.

John

 

I have a 2.5" Seagate Expansion 4TB External Hard Drive.

The highest internal HDD's for available right now top out at 2GB.
I hadn't seen or heard anything about upcoming releases of higher capacity drives though...

There are already 4TB SSD's 2.5" available for purchase (if you can afford one of course - it's price is about 7x higher than my external 4tb hdd).

At this rate, I think that affordable high capacity consumer SSD's will overshoot mobile HDD's (Which don't seem to be too high of a priority).


I also noticed several science and technology developments years ago that should have enabled higher capacity drives by now, but alas, like most other research it's almost never put into practical use due to artificial cost prohibitions, and its still based on upgrading HDD's (which are really outdated technology).

 

is 4TB currently the best value per MB for 2.5 portable hard drive

 

It's now probably the best value given that 5TB is available so 4TB no longer carries a price premium due to having the highest capacity. It's easy to do the cost/ TB calculation.

John

 

Just ordered the 5TB seagate 15mm drive for 130 USD to see if it will fit in my optical bay of my Ranger

 

i always suspected that DTR laptops always had way more space than just for 9mm hard drives... good find!

 

Confirmed fits perfectly and works in the Ranger R1

 

You can use software like DiskZIP to max out drive capacity using compression, which also accelerates disk read speeds.

On my data disk with mostly incompressible/pre-compressed videos and music, the compression ratio is 1.2:1, which gives you roughly 200 GB on the terabyte.

On my boot disk with mostly compressible program files and data, the space saving is 1.5:1, which gives you half an extra terabyte for each uncompressed TB.

Considering it also accelerates disk read speeds (even on NVMe SSDs, but especially on slower SSD and HDDs), its a win-win scenario.

 

Shopping for a 2.5" HDD now, found out that some of the 4TB Seagate drives are 5-platter like 5TB, while others are 4-platter. I would honestly prefer a 4-platter/8-head drive for more reliability, but since buying a 4TB drive is a lottery - maybe I should just get a 5-platter/10 head 5TB drive. \=

 

While I love things like this on the fly disk compression software, I've been burned enough that I don't use them any longer. Make sure you have backups for the important stuff on a non-compressed disk

With such high volume storage available for cheap these days, it seems hardly worth it...I used to restore after corruption thinking it was still worth it, until around the 5th time.

Then I had a hardware accelerated compression card, which improved reliability somewhat, as it had battery backup on it and recovery at boot to complete writes interrupted, but after that wasn't supported in newer versions of Windows, newer larger drives were available, so I forgot about it until seeing your post.

I hope it works reliably for you, and Windows is stable enough to keep it going without corruption. If you run into problems please post a follow up.

 

Thank you very much for your concern. I've been using this software for just about two years now and no issues.

In fact, its saved me a couple times from malware/ransomware infections thanks to its built-in System Refresh functionality (goes back to the last time you had optimized the system).

DiskZIP does not recommend on-the-fly compression, because doing so degrades disk performance very substantially. This software is primarily intended for disk acceleration, with the secondary (but very tangible) benefit of extra disk space, and malware protection as icing on the cake.

Could you clarify what software you are referring to? I haven't heard of hardware accelerated compression cards in almost 30 years! That sounds from an era long bygone.

I've never heard of a hardware accelerated compression card with a built-in backup feature though, not even from 30 years ago.

 

Yup, that's about right, some time in the 90's, PC and Mac versions - not sure if they were the same software, but disk compression software on the fly was popular on both OS's during that time

I had a bunch of Sun systems at the time too

The hardware card was in a PC. Hmm, 386/40 I think... it's been too long to remember the name of the card, but the software was DiskDoubler /AutoDoubler...

Glad you haven't had any issues recently

 

Based on your feedback, it seems to me these are completely unrelated products from totally unrelated companies.

How many weeks/months/years had you gone by with the legacy tools before running into issues with corruption?

I suppose any product that is compatible with modern Windows has substantially higher standards of stability, but it'd be good to cross-reference anyways.

 

On systems that weren't doing development or chancy moves that can cause crashes, not often, I think a couple of times over a few years.

On the systems that were busy daily doing builds and tests, the 5 or more times I needed to reload from backups were weekly or more often, which is why I went looking for a hardware solution.

It's much easier now with cheap storage

 

Wow, that sounds terrible, and helps clarify where you're coming from substantially. It must have taken a lot of patience, dealing with daily or weekly restores. I couldn't have dealt with that on any account!

We build complex (and multi-GB payload) enterprise software on our DiskZIP'ped machines, absolutely no issues for two years now, and counting.

This includes continuous integration/daily pulls/cruise control rebuilds/VM testing/etc.

Maybe you should give DiskZIP a try?

Running a little faster never hurts!

 

Maybe some day, when I run out of things to do...

Sounds fun though, glad it's working out for you, I'll keep it in mind.

When you are already building lots of systems daily, VM's and metal, and have a dozen systems at home of various OS breed's, you are always backing up and restoring, when it's a constant, and not an exception - it's no biggie.

Sounds like you are on that road too, so you can relate. Optimizing comes with the territory, to improve test cycles.

Killing a system due to testing is just part of the process, and with hundreds of systems going smoothly all the time it's a nice break to debug the problems.

 

Thanks to the System Refresh functionality offered by DiskZIP, I don't recall the latest time we had to rebuild a system after we standardized on DiskZIP for our production use.

The compressed disk image is impregnable not only to malware, but also to buggy software updates, drivers, unwanted Windows Updates, and more. It's a single click "System Refresh" to revert the system to its last compressed state. I cannot overstate how convenient this option is, in today's world of constantly - and forcefully! - updated software.

Backups - and restores - are ridiculously easy too, just copy the compressed disk image file. Cloning a system works the exact same way as well.

I'm also glad you mentioned virtual machines. DiskZIP has a tool called Max which is designed for dealing with them.

I have just under 100 VMs in my library - comprised of 32 and 64 bit Windows versions, including various service pack levels, as well as some specialized VMs with preinstalled software and settings to test our enterprise software, as well as some operating systems duplicated for different languages. Here's some statistics on this volume, compressed using DiskZIP Max:

1,057 GB uncompressed
357 GB compressed

2.9:1 compression ratio

That's pretty crazy! There's no way I could have fit all of these VMs into so little space without DiskZIP, and I'm grateful for it. I'll never stop singing their praise.