14 DAY TRIAL // Even with all the rave surrounding solid state drives, hard disk drives continue to be the prime choice when it's capacity you're looking for instead of sheer speed. The lower price compared to SSDs with a fraction of the same storage capacity helps a lot too.
Toshiba has many different series of magnetic storage solutions like this, but one line called Desktop 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Serial ATA 3.0 Hard Drive didn't have anything over 3 TB until now.
One reason is that 4 TB, 5 TB and 6 TB capacities reached the market over the course of a pretty short period compared to how long HDDs have been around.
So while there are some higher-storage mission critical/enterprise HDDs for sale here and there, Toshiba's main consumer series is only now welcoming 4 TB and 5 TB models.
The traits of the new Toshiba hard drive units
For one thing, they possess the standard SATA III 6.0 Gbps connectivity interface, rendering them compatible with pretty much every PC out there.
And that's not limited to computers running Windows. In addition to Windows 8.1, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP, the storage devices can be used in Apple Mac systems as long as the OS version is Mac OS X 10.6 or newer (Mac OS X 10.7, 10.8 and 10.9). Various Linux distributions will have a fairly easy time of it as well.
The 4 TB and 5 TB HDDs have Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technology, which is the main reason for the higher capacity.
Native Command Queuing (NCQ) is included as well, for reliability, and TMR Head Recording technology optimizes performance even beyond what the 7,200 RPM platter speed would normally allow alone.
Availability and pricing
The Toshiba 4 TB and 5 TB Desktop 3.5" Internal Hard Drive models should be up for order through various retailers and Toshiba's own website for $299 / €299 and $399 / €399, respectively. Both are accompanied by a standard limited warranty (3 years) and can be found in the USA, Latin America and Canada. No word on when the countries in the rest of the world will get their own shipments.
"Toshiba has been developing and manufacturing hard drives for more than 20 years," said Maciek Brzeski, Vice President of Branded Storage Products, Toshiba Digital Products Division. "The time is right to upgrade our offerings not only to meet, but to get ahead of consumers' expectations by expanding our offering of our internal 3.5" hard drives to 4TB and 5TB sizes."