Terabyte drives available soon

[John Altenmueller]

Hitachi has now announced a 1-terabyte internal hard drive, claiming they're the first to unveil a 1 terabyte hard drive in the industry. It doesn't sound terribly impressive, given the fact that storage mediums are increasing faster than you can blink an eye.

However, they have done quite a feat if you look more closely. For one, the pricing is very attractive. This hard drive costs a mere $399, cheaper than a lot of smaller-capicitated portable hard drives. This makes it quite inexpensive to get the huge amounts of storage, which will especially attract server-storage people.

Secondly, they have made this the size of a regular hard drive. Any PC can be upgraded to this drive, simply by swapping out the old one with the Hitachi version, because Hitachi used the industry-standard, IDE connections. IDE looks like it is gradually getting replaced with Serial ATA, a faster technology, so look for a SATA-compatible 1 TB drive from Hitachi in the future.

It may seem like Hitachi is not the first to create a 1 TB drive. The hard drive manufacturer LaCie has been creating portable 1 TB drives for a while already. However, that was not truly a 1 TB drive, as it was simply two 500 GB drives in one case. Hitachi managed to get a whole terabyte into a regular drive, essentially doubling the drive's density when compared to the LaCie drive.

Hitachi's timing was perfect - right before the consumer electronics show.

Making a move like this is exciting, but it will not likely be picked up by the mainstream customers yet. Call me old-fashioned if you want, but I barely need more than 10 gigabytes for my data. This drive is 100 times larger than that. However, I can see it useful in servers, where IDE controllers are at a minimum. This drive might be their answer.

One thing that has not been mentioned is actual performance. Sure, almost any data size is achievable, provided you have enough room for it. But what about the speed of the drive? And how reliable will it be in the long-term? These questions are more likely to be asked by the type of people who need them most, that is the server and storage-folk, who cannot afford to lose data. This question can only be answered by test of time.

[jwenting]

1TB may sound like a lot now, but I still remember buying my first PC in 1992 and people declaring me crazy for opting to get one with a 40MB drive.
"You'll never need that much space" was the most common criticism.

10GB these days is nothing. When I spent a day photographing an airshow last summer I ended up with 7GB of photos in just a few hours.
And that's the raw data, once processed that became roughly 70GB.

[jbennet]

yes Visual Studio, XP and office etc.... come to like 20gb on my machine

[blud]

Currently I have 1.5 Terabyte on my home PC, I look forward to one of these new TeraByte drives to add to my PC :cheesy:

[cscgal]

I'm confused who the targeted audience for this drive is. As you say, consumers aren't really in dire need of a terabyte of storage right now, and high end people and people with servers are going to want more than the slow IDE connection when things like SATA and SCSI are available.

[happygeek]

Sometimes you have to take the initiative and help create a market.

Although I agree that most consumers are not in dire need of this amount of storage, plenty soon will be as the 'PC as media centre' concept continues to get a grip. Streaming video, digital photography, MP3 jukeboxes all require hefty storage requirements and I think that Hitachi is showing a commitment to meet them both now and in the future.

This is a good thing, IMHO, and much preferable to the storage folk sitting back and not bothering to push the technical boundaries.