No matter how much hard drive space you have, it never seems to be enough - all those applications, iTunes movies and photos have to go somewhere - but Seagate might have the answer to storage shortage woes with a new 16TB hard disk that it's planning to launch next year.
The company revealed its plans during an earnings conference call, saying that it intends to aggressively increase the sizes of its traditional mechanical 3.5-inch SATA disk drives in 2018 and beyond.
That means a 16TB drive before the end of next year, which should give you enough room for all those 4K GoPro movies you've been shooting. The biggest hard drive Seagate makes at the moment tops out at 10GB and there's a 12GB version currently in testing.
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Size does matter
While many laptops now come with solid-state drives (SSDs) at lower capacities, Seagate CEO Steve Luczo says there's still a healthy demand for the old-fashioned spinning variety of disk, especially with users keen to get more storage space inside their PCs.
There's no word yet on how much these drives will cost - probably quite a lot - but disk prices are continuing to drop across the board and if you can't stretch to a 16GB model then Seagate will happily sell you a 12TB or 14TB version instead.
While Seagate's unit sales actually dropped by 10 percent last year, Luczo says the company sees potential for growth in making fewer drives at higher capacities. "It's probably going to be a growing market, because we see growth in all those applications that require high capacity," he said.
