Get ready for 4TB internal hard drives for your desktop PC

Somehow hard drive manufacturers can keep squeezing out more and more capacity from those magnetic platters. While you can already purchase 4TB external hard drives, internal drives have been limited to a "mere" 3TB. Until now.

In Japan (first, as always), it appears that Hitachi GST is already selling a 4TB internal DeskStar drive, even if it hasn't been announced yet. It comes with 32MB cache, SATA III interface, and an estimated spin rate of 5900rpm. And it's not cheap, costing approximately $345 for those four terabytes.

Because the 4TB drive hasn't been officially released yet, we have no idea when and if it will make its way stateside. Given the flooding that's crippled drive production in Thailand, that date may be later than Hitachi initially expected. Nonetheless, now that the first 4TB drive is out in the wild, we might see one of the remaining hard drive manufacturers officially announce one as soon as CES next month.