Seagate has begun to ship the world's first 4TB hard drives that feature 1TB platters. Seagate says that the four platter design is one that allows for the highest performance possible, while doubling capacity and reducing cost.

The drives are said to also feature the highest average data rate of any desktop hard drive that is currently sold on the market today. The new design consumes 35-percent less power than competing drives, and features 64MB of total cache space.

To put things into perspective, a 4TB HDD can house 450 hours of HD video, 1 million+ songs and 800,000 DSLR quality photos. The 4TB model has more than 800,000 times the storage capacity of the first Seagate HDD introduced in 1979 and is hundreds of times smaller in physical size.

Source