1TB drives getting ready to hit the streets
1TB drives getting ready to hit the streets
It seems the day of the 1-terabyte consumer hard drive has finally become a reality.
By Jacqui Cheng, Ars Technica
Hitachi announced yesterday, just before the start of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, that it will be shipping a 1TB hard drive by the end of the first quarter in 2007. The drive will be the first of three that the company is expecting to release in 2007; the other two are aimed at video pros and the enterprise market. Those two will ship in the second quarter of the year.
The 3.5" Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 will run at 7200 rpm, have a 32MB buffer, and be available as SATA 3.0Gb/s or Parallel-ATA 133. The company did not max out on areal density on the drives though; instead of trying to cram 250GB onto four platters, Hitachi opted to go with a 200GB-per-platter, five-platter approach. Hitachi's director of market and product strategy Doug Pickford told PC World that "About 250GB per platter is the next bump on the areal density curve, but we've backed off from doing that in order to achieve higher reliability at this time."
Hitachi is vying to be the first to the market with a 1TB drive. If the drive does in fact ship in the first quarter of the year, Hitachi will likely beat out Seagate, which is also rushing to the plate with their own 1TB drive. Seagate's drive is expected to be out within the first half of the year and use only four platters, at 250GB per platter. Both make use of perpendicular recording technologies and will be demoed at CES next week.
A 1TB hard drive for $399 is likely to be an instant hit among early adopters and video pros. That price translates to about 40 cents per gigabyte, or 0.04 cents per megabyte. Compared to Seagate's 750GB Barracuda 7200.10 drive?which comes out to about 60 cents per gigabyte and 0.06 cents per megabyte ($349.99 from Amazon)?and the 500GB Hitachi Deskstar 7K500?about 42 cents per gigabyte and 0.042 cents per megabyte ($209.95 from Amazon)?the DeskStar 7K1000 offers a slight value over the currently available competition.
Even people who don't think they need that much storage will probably need it eventually, says Pickford, due to the increasing size of television and movie files. But how exactly does one back up a 1TB drive? With another 1TB drive? A RAID of 1TB drives? That's sure to add up quickly, and some of the Ars staff is scared of the thought of backing up 1TB worth of data to tape. And this is just the beginning?Seagate's R&D labs are already working on 300 terabit (about 37.5 terabytes) drives to be launched within the next decade. Try to back that up to a tape drive.
