The new Hitachi HDD uses the industry’s standard 3.5-inch form factor and includes 32MB of cache memory and a total of four platters in order to reach its 4TB storage capacity.

Spindle speed is set at 5900RPM, just as it’s the case with the rest of the company’s CoolSpin hard drives, Hitachi claiming that together with its advanced power management techniques this enabled the HDD to use less power than competing products.

In fact, the company says that compared to its Deskstar 7K3000 7,200 RPM drives, this new 4TB model is capable of achieving up to a 28 percent idle power saving while the idle acoustic level is estimated at 2.5 bels.
 
Outside of the Deskstar 5K4000 hard drive, the retail package also includes all the necessary mounting screws and install instructions, but also a software download that allows 32- and 64-bit Windows, Apple OS X and Linux systems to use the full capacity of the 4TB drive.

Hitachi is currently shipping the 4TB Deskstar 5K4000 in limited quantities to online and retail stores with a suggested retail price of $399.99. Board availability is expected to arrive in the first quarter of 2012. 

Together with the retail version of the new Deskstar 5K4000, Hitachi also announced a new external storage solution based on this HDD, namely the 4TB Hitachi Touro Desk External Drive.

The Touro HDD will be available in January of 2012 with a $419.99 MSRP and also features a free subscription to the HitachiBackup.com cloud service which offers 3GB of storage capacity to its users.