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Hitachi hard drive heralds the Terabyte Era
We've seen terabyte hard drives before, but they've typically been restricted to posh high-end music servers that your rich uncle Darrell has in his second living room. Hitachi's 1-TB drive, announced yesterday and sure to be touted mightily at CES next week, gives unprecedented storage to anyone with $399. Called the Deskstar 7K1000, the drive is due to come out this spring.
The impressively small (3.5-inch diameter) drive is meant to be installed in desktops, not carried around separately, though Hitachi also has a version in the works for digital video recorders (DVRs) due in the spring, which should make HDTV packrats happy. In response, hard-drive-maker Seagate picked up the gauntlet and also promises a 3.5-inch 1-TB hard drive this winter.
May as well start getting used to talking about "TBs" or "tibs" or whatever shorthand we're going to use in this new age of storage. In case you're not sure, a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, roughly one-tenth the information stored in the Library of Congress, according to a study from UC Berkeley. It's also about the same as 12 and a half 80-GB iPods. Doesn't sound so impressive now, does it, Mr. Berkeley Smarty-pants?
By BioTube at 6:21 PM ON 01/05/07
I think it's worth noting that your computer won't show that as a terabyte. For reasons unknown, hard drive manufacturers never caught on to the fact that OSs measure that space in BINARY powers, meanig that it takes 1024 of a unit to make the next(the exception being that 8 bits=1 byte).
By Murcielago05 at 8:53 PM ON 01/05/07
WOW...already!!! Impressive.
I agree with Biotube...but they will never do it, because it will look like there offering less storage, for more money, to the average joe out their...and besides, if one company did it, the others wouldn't, and would look like a "better buy" to the average consumer.
I hope they all decide to change this in the future....several years ago this didn't matter much, because they were only shaving off a gig or two, but now with HD's getting so big, people plug in there new drive and its vastly smaller then what they thought they bought.
I bought a 320 GB drive a month back, and plugged it in and it read 298 GB's.
By MajorDavis86 at 10:32 AM ON 01/07/07
Wow this is awesome, the TB era! But I honestly can't imagine any home users filling up that much space.
As for the other comments about HD size, you guys should realize that you ARE getting exactly what you thought you were. One terrabyte is one trillion bytes. And that is exactly what you will get. The computer simply counts in powers of 2. Counting differently doesn't change the total. If you order 24 donuts from the bakery, some may say you got 2 dozen donuts. Others might say that since a bakers dozen is 13, you only got 1 and 11/13 dozen donuts. But either way, you still got 24 donuts. You're still getting all your HD space, the computer just defines it differently.
By apollounplugged at 6:59 PM ON 01/07/07
You say noone can fill up this space. I honorably disagree. By the spring time release, there will be several modchips availible for both xbox360, and playstation3. 1 terabyte is nolonger the new in my opinion, the government is already on the peta-byte scale. High definition 1080p tivos will have these terabyte drives in them retail stock... Its 2007 guys, theres no stopping technology anymore. Dont be suprised if you see a 3 color laser based dlp projector by spring as well. Now what will be very shocking , is to see solid state memory advance near the 100gig mark, and become cheaper than harddisc.
By tagno25 at 11:33 AM ON 03/29/07
There is a big difference between 1000000000000 bytes(SI) and 1099511627776 Bytes(Binary).
I would be getting riped off by 99511627776 bytes(92GB), Enough to make me want to just Raid 5 multiple HDs.
One terrabyte is 1099511627776 bytes in binary
One terrabyte is 1000000000000 bytes in SI
By janine excess at 5:26 PM ON 12/15/09
impresive! an HDD comes out with 3.5" but up to 1tb capacity! fantastic..
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