Terabyte drives available soon

John A 0 528 Views

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.

Dani AI

Generated

Thread captured the moment terabyte-class single-disk storage started to matter, and the replies show the split in thinking: and questioned who the immediate market is, while and pointed to media-heavy workflows that can fill space fast and noted home setups already growing large. The most useful gaps to address are practical: how to match a drive to a workload, what to test up front, and how to manage reliability and redundancy as capacities grow.

Pick a drive for the job. For large archives and media libraries you want high sustained throughput; for OS or database use you want good random IOPS and low latency. In multi-disk enclosures look for firmware and mechanical features tuned to multi-drive operation (vibration tolerance, predictable error-recovery behaviour). Also account for the operational implications of big spindles: longer rebuild windows and greater exposure during recovery—plan redundancy accordingly (mirrors or dual-parity are safer than single-parity for large disks).

Practical checklist before trusting a new disk: run a short burn‑in, check SMART attributes regularly, measure sustained transfer rates, and perform read-only surface scans if you plan long-term storage. Automate integrity checks (periodic scrubs or file checksums) to catch silent bit-rot, and keep at least one independent backup copy off the primary array (the classic 3-2-1 idea). Example Linux commands to begin quick health and integrity checks:

# quick SMART and info
smartctl -a /dev/sdX

# simple checksum for a large file
sha1sum backup.iso > backup.iso.sha1
sha1sum -c backup.iso.sha1

Bottom line: large single disks are convenient and economical for personal media libraries, but for anything that must stay available you still need proper redundancy, monitoring, and an explicit backup policy. That balances the practical concerns raised through the thread and gives a simple path forward for integrating very large drives.

Member Avatar for jwenting
jwenting 1,905 duckman

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.

Member Avatar for jbennet
jbennet 1,618 Most Valuable Poster

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

Member Avatar for blud
blud 82 Linux Reject

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:

Member Avatar for Dani
Dani 5,664 The Queen of DaniWeb

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.

Member Avatar for happygeek
happygeek 2,411 Most Valuable Poster

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.

Member Avatar for mindmergepk
mindmergepk 0 Newbie Poster

i was wondering how quickly games are changing, 8 years ago people think they may not need such storage but now manufacturers like Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung has introduce 10TB drive. In 8 long years, need of storage has increased by 10 times if am not wrong. there is lot more to see in coming years.

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