Did a Seagate sales bloke just say 5TB drives are coming?

Has a Seagate Middle East sales guy just let slip that 5TB drives will be here in three months?

He's identified on a video uploaded to YouTube as "Christian from Seagate", and his video interview has been mentioned on Twitter. The Tbreak video, below, records an interview at GITEX '11, a technology event in Dubai.

Seagate has a Christian Assaf as its channel sales manager for Middle East and Africa, according to a LinkedIn entry, and he looks like the guy in the video. A Google image search throws up more pictures.

Here is a transcript of the relevant part of the video, about six minutes in: "Now we have 1TB per disk. If you just do a simple calculation ... now a drive can have five disks ... so suddenly you make the disk 5TB ... within three months you will see it."

Seagate has a Constellation ES.2 3.5-inch drive which holds 3TB on its five platters as well as a similar 5-platter 3TB Barracuda XT. It looks like we've just seen a product pre-announcement.

El Reg has asked Seagate for a comment. ®

Bootnote

Since we published this, a Seagate spokesman has been in touch to say: "It is hardly a revelation that hard drive capacities will increase in the future or that sometime soon there will be a 5TB offering."