The One Terabyte Hard Disk

[AlecWest]

Hitachi To Produce 1 Terabyte Desktop Drives

WebProNews | Staff Writer | 2005-04-04

Hitachi's division of storage technologies, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, is expected to announce they will begin selling 1-terabyte desktop drives later this year.

In order to increase storage capacities, HGST is employing perpendicular recording, which Macworld describes as:

Perpendicular recording is perhaps the most significant near-term step in the evolution of hard-disk drive technology. The method is similar to the longitudinal recording used in today's drives in that it relies on magnetically charged particles for data storage. In today's drives, the north and south poles of the magnetic particles run parallel to the disc but in the new method they are arranged perpendicular to the disc, as the name suggests.

The result of this new arrangement is that each particle occupies a smaller area of the disk's surface and so more particles can be crammed onto the disk. This is measured as the areal density and today's most advanced drives can store between 100Gb (gigabits) and 120Gb of data in a square inch of disk space.

With this method, HGST envisions storage capacities of 230Gb per square inch by 2007. This technology would also enable the 1TB, 3.5-inch drive and 20GB, 1-inch drive. Hitachi is expected to officially announce their intentions later today.

http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusinessnews/wpn-45-20050404HitachiToProduce1TerabyteD...topDrives.html

[BJ_M]

kewl !

[waheed]

All the storage you need.

[BJ_M]

they said that when 10meg drives came out

[mbellot]

All the storage you need.

For at least a month...

Seriously tho, these ever expanding drives cause real problems when it comes to backing up data.

Just think how many Dual Layer DVDs it would take to back up a 1TB drive?

[State Of Mind]

And PerfectDisk users who do a SmartPlacement Defrag... with 1 TB of data on the HD that would take like... a month.

[akrako1]

they said that when 10meg drives came out

Man, do you realize how many 5 1/4" discs you can fit an a 10meg drive? Like, all of 'em... at least that's how I felt when I got my first HDD....

[SLK001]

All the storage you need.

It's been my experience that programs and data will expand to fill the available storage space! Sort of like a law of nature!

[dun4cheap]

I can wait to back it up. I think I will use 3.5" disc .

More data to lose at once haha..

IBM/Hitachi, I hope they imrpove the quality of the drive as well.

[only_emo_kid]

..and a price?

[AlecWest]

they said that when 10meg drives came out

I seem to remember that back in the days of DOS, Bill Gates once said something like, "No one should ever need more than 640k of RAM." Assuming these drives are as fast or faster than current hard drives, they should come in mighty handy. I suspect, with a 64bit system (and lots of RAM), the need for keeping separate drives for capture purposes will disappear. But, I imagine hard-drive backups will be a pain.

[AlecWest]

..and a price?

They don't say. At first, it'll probably be prohibitive. But as more manufacturers jump on board (Hitachi patents notwithstanding), competition should drive the price down.

They say it will be out by year's end. By the end of 2006, "ordinary" people might be able to afford them.

[sanjayk]

It is futile to try to get more disk space. Data will always expands to fill any void.

- Murphy Law

[NightWing]

It is futile to try to get more disk space. Data will always expands to fill any void.

- Murphy Law

Murphy was an optomist!

Simple to back up. Get a second drive...

[ViRaL1]

They announced their 500GB drives at LEAST earlier and I've yet to see anything on the market.

[NightWing]

Frys I think this weekend have a 1tb box for 988... And falling....

[ViRaL1]

Frys I think this weekend have a 1tb box for 988... And falling....

Not a single drive though.

[NightWing]

Possible about one year away. It takes 4 250 to do it.

[waheed]

Well, I meant to say all the storage needs for todays requirements

Maybe in future, we will be needing drives with larger capacities.

It is futile to try to get more disk space. Data will always expands to fill any void.

I agree with this statement. High Definition DVD or Blue Ray is a good example. These video formats will require huge amounts of disk space compared to DVD.

[handyguy]

U can buy at buy.com
1 Terabyte External Drive - 1TBEXT-HDD

Toshiba : 1TBEXT-HDD : 1 Terabyte External Drive
Item#: C45XPX
Our Price: $4,576.99
List Price: $9,800.00
You Save: $5,223.01
See Details

Temporarily Sold Out.

[AlecWest]

1 Terabyte External Drive - 1TBEXT-HDD

Hmmmm ... for some reason, I thought it was an "internal" drive. The article did say it was a 3.5" drive in the last paragraph. Makes me wonder how long it will be before an internal 1TB drive will debut. The last thing most people would want is something else taking up space on their desk.

[overclockxp]

I have almost a TB hooked up to my computer. I have over 100 hours of history channel that needs to be converted. I really need a dual core CPU. That would be cool to render two dvds at once.

[BetaMaster]

When I got my first computer with a hard drive, I wondered how I would ever fill up 851MB! It took me less than a year before it was stuffed to capacity - I had to add a Jaz and a 2.5GB second drive eventually. My new 160GB drive is usually 80-90% full. 1TB? Shouldn't take me long to fill it up if I start authoring DVD-HD or Blu-Ray discs (which top 20GB each) which should come to be available at the same time.

[ViRaL1]

The externals that you see out now are just RAID arrays.

You can find one as low as $820.

[AlecWest]

I have over 100 hours of history channel that needs to be converted.

Ahhh, a kindred spirit. I archive a lot of stuff from the History Channel and Discovery (as well as PBS and CSPAN).

The externals that you see out now are just RAID arrays.

These new 1TB drives ... are they 7200 RPM or better?

[edDV]

All the storage you need.

Not for me. Got 1.4 TB now need 2TB more.
HDTV is only making things worse.

[ViRaL1]

I have over 100 hours of history channel that needs to be converted.

Ahhh, a kindred spirit. I archive a lot of stuff from the History Channel and Discovery (as well as PBS and CSPAN).

The externals that you see out now are just RAID arrays.

These new 1TB drives ... are they 7200 RPM or better?

Yes, 7200s.

http://www.lacie.com/products/clearance/products/?id=10007

1.6TB for less than $1,500 for refurb.

I can't wait til I can make my 7GB RAID 5 array.

[Zisguy1]

they said that when 10meg drives came out

Yeah, but size is growing so fast there's gonna be a "breaking point" where there's simply little use for so much space on a typical desktop workstation. One terabyte is so large, it should easily accommodate full backups of every DVD in the average person's collection (probably with room to spare). Double that to two terabytes and what are you gonna fill it with, MP3's? Gimme a break.

It's like what's happening with CPU's right now... aside from gaming (and even there, video cards are the main bottleneck), more and more raw power is going unused. For browsing the Web, checking Email, spreadsheets, word processing, "ordinary" tasks, 4GHz is absurd overkill.

Comes a point where hardware power grows beyond everyday usefulness. It hasn't happened yet, but I predict it's on the horizon. I think 64-bits may be a practical limit in desktop computing, beyond which only Hollywood animators and rocket scientists may need more.

[wingnut]

hmm 1tb hard disk eh?

three words for you:
hard-disk-failure
you wouldn't want to fill one with shows then have it collapse, bad enough when one of my 80gigs died last year with unarchived shows on it, DOH!


Edz

[EvilWizardGlick]

they said that when 10meg drives came out

Yeah, but size is growing so fast there's gonna be a "breaking point" where there's simply little use for so much space on a typical desktop workstation. One terabyte is so large, it should easily accommodate full backups of every DVD in the average person's collection (probably with room to spare). Double that to two terabytes and what are you gonna fill it with, MP3's? Gimme a break.

It's like what's happening with CPU's right now... aside from gaming (and even there, video cards are the main bottleneck), more and more raw power is going unused. For browsing the Web, checking Email, spreadsheets, word processing, "ordinary" tasks, 4GHz is absurd overkill.

Comes a point where hardware power grows beyond everyday usefulness. It hasn't happened yet, but I predict it's on the horizon. I think 64-bits may be a practical limit in desktop computing, beyond which only Hollywood animators and rocket scientists may need more.

Never happen. There is a real rule that states the amount of work given will always fill the time allowed. The same is true with HD space.
Bigger better games, bigger better software. As quality increases the room to store that quality increases.
Someone on another site mentioned a new television format with 1 trillion colors. How much HD space does that take?
Also as processors get faster the better we can model weather, anatomy, whatever we choose. And games will take advantage of that speed for more realism.
Eventually the computer will be an exact, or better, duplicate of the real world. Games (and sex) will be totally immersive. The effects of medication will be correctly modeled and proper dosages individually allocated.
In theory this could go onto infinity, eventually allowing for modeling of the multiverse. Which would change physics.
What most people fail to understand is as technology gets better it makes technology even better. A viscious circle of betterment that extends infinitely.
The only thing limiting this is the speed of implementation.