Hitachi sez: 1TB drives by end of year

We don't pretend to attract too many readers who were around when IBM unleashed their model 350 hard disk in the RAMAC some fifty years ago. So you regular, mild-mannered geeks probably aren't aware that the original magnettic spinner featured no less than 50, 24-inch platters for a whopping (at that time) 5MB of storage. Why 24-inches? Easy, the disk was engineered to be "small enough" to fit through a standard door frame! My my, how times have changed. Today we're squeezing 12GB of storage into Jetsonian 1-inch drives while Seagate merrily stuffs a full 750GB of perpendicular goodness into a 3.5-incher. And with drive capacities effectively doubling every two years, it comes as little surprise to hear a product VP from Hitachi predicting a 3.5-inch drive sporting 1TB (1,000GB) before the year is up. Still, it's always good to get the poop direct from the source, so to speak.

[jjk @ Aug 15th 2006 8:32AM]

Am I the only one that is content to buy new HDDs rather than to fit all music, photos, videos, and apps into one huge Hdd?

[ryan @ Aug 15th 2006 8:43AM]

no one is making you buy it

hell, you should be happy, in a year or two, this will be one of the hdd's you're buying instead of the new, even larger hdd's that you're complaining about

[Intrepid @ Aug 15th 2006 8:45AM]

Where is my flash drive?

[Samuel McConnell @ Aug 15th 2006 9:08AM]

Mm, I hope that means I'll be able to order a Mac Pro with 4TB of hard drive space (and, of course, the requisite 16GB RAM).

[que @ Aug 15th 2006 9:32AM]

i've had some bad luck with hard drives crashing on me, and having a 1 TB drive crash would be disastrous to say the least.
each time its happened in the past its been at most 200 or 250 GB, and it seems like short of a mirrored RAID, there's no way to ensure that all the data on a 1 TB drive is safe.
perhaps they should work on making drives more resilient and reliable?

[Elliott @ Aug 15th 2006 9:51AM]

I don't know about anyone else, but I've never had anything but problems with Hitachi drives, the last thing I'll ever do is place 1TB worth of valuable data on a drive that I know isn't going to last out the warranty.

[tiuk @ Aug 15th 2006 10:12AM]

que - This is why I intend to build a RAID of 250-320 GB drives. It'll even cost less to boot. Now, in a couple years when 1 TB drives cost ~$100 each, I'll be happy to build an array of those. IMO, anyone who trusts ANY amount of data to a mechanical hard drive should either have their drives in an array, make frequent backups to some other medium, or just doesn't care what happens to it.

[unimental @ Aug 15th 2006 10:28AM]

I just purchased another pair of 250 GB drives last month (now up to 6 external HDs, 2 internal), and am fine with sticking to that capacity. Bigger drives mean lower prices for what still seems like a ton of real estate. Someday I'm sure I'll be saying the same thing about 1 TB drives when 10 TB is the latest-and-greatest.

[Tull @ Aug 15th 2006 10:41AM]

I just want to know what people keep on their harddrives, I've been using a 160 gb drive for almost two years now and still have 100 gb of space left. I put anything that I feel as important on removable media that I know won't fail. DVDs and CDs are relatively cheap now and I'm assuming will be much cheaper then buying two of these jobbies and putting them in a RAID array.

[que @ Aug 15th 2006 10:49AM]

Tull:
you're right DVD's and CD's ARE cheap, but you sacrifice convenience. every DVD i own is ripped to hard drive and shared on my network, meaning that my entire DVD library is available on any computer including my media center machine, instead of having to dig through DVD's or look through cases. And at 5-7 GB a piece, hard drives fill up quick.
Ofcourse, this is the data that is expendable, and it would merely be an inconvenience if that drive were to crash. What's more important is my hundreds of gigs of photographs which I have taken over the years and all of my music, as well as home movies which have long since been moved off of tape to digital formats.

[que @ Aug 15th 2006 10:52AM]

"I put anything that I feel as important on removable media that I know won't fail."

Tull:
Also, optical media such as DVD's and CD-R's are not fail proof. They have a shelf life of under 10 years generally, and you'd be hard pressed to get data off of a 5 year old CD-R. Important optical media backups are generally recreated every 2-3 years.

[peter @ Aug 15th 2006 10:53AM]

Two big drives in a mirror is more stable than DVD/CDs which degraded with time.

Also, Time is money. It takes a lot of time to put several hundred gigabytes on DVD, more so if you have a duplicate for safety and then do you regularly check all those disks to ensure that they are still intact?

Mirrored disks are fast and checked and online.

[aws910 @ Aug 15th 2006 11:06AM]

Tull has obviously never used BitTorrent.

[James @ Aug 15th 2006 11:14AM]

I just hope they start manufacturing what they display. The actual space on the HDD is never what it's advertised. My 2 250gb's only have 235gb and 241gb space, my 120gb has 112gb, and my 200gb has 189gb. That's after properly reformating, etc. It seems to vary based on brand, with WD skimming the most (I only have WD, Maxtor, and Seagate). Are they not going by actual GB? or saying 1,000b is 1KB instead of 1,024b? In a 1TB HDD, losing 40-100GB because of this could be a real problem. I was told that some companies offer the rest of the space if you request it (on a seperate HDD) or something like that.

[que @ Aug 15th 2006 11:17AM]

James:
Look on the box of your drive, or on WD/Maxtor/Seagate/Hitachi/Samsung/etc websites. You'll see this nugget of information:

One gigabyte (GB) = one billion bytes. One terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment.

Between this little sleight of hand and the file system on your drive, that's where you lose the gigs.

[joe @ Aug 15th 2006 11:21AM]

here we go again: "but will it hold all my pr0n!?"

[Mike @ Aug 15th 2006 11:39AM]

I'd like to see a chart that has each year since the HDD was invented that would show the maximum storage capacity of the biggest HDD for that year that was available as a standard consumer HDD.

Would be neat to see where the huge increases were and what years just kind of strolled on by.

[EdZ @ Aug 15th 2006 11:49AM]

Why not just make 5 1/2" drives with much larger capacities? Most people have free 5 1/2" drive bays anyway.

[Rick @ Aug 15th 2006 12:03PM]

can't wait till the 1TB drives come out and go down in price... upgrade my 1TB 4-drive Enfrant network storage to 3TB. :-)

[Jeff @ Aug 15th 2006 12:22PM]

Two things
1. it would also be interesting to track not only HHD size but also speed of spin as well as data access.
2. The reason they don't use larger platters is rotational speed. A 3.5 HDD spinning at 15K has the outer edge spinning at just below the sound of speed. Cross that barrier and you tend to get accessive vibration, with heads floating mere microns above the platter any vibration will cause a head crash.

[bazald @ Aug 15th 2006 12:28PM]

Is is 1024^3 or 1000^3. If it is the latter it is only 900 GB, really.

[Jeremy @ Aug 15th 2006 12:52PM]

Makes my 60 gig internal iBook G4 drive look pitiful......

[Tull @ Aug 15th 2006 12:56PM]

@ aws910:
Of course I use bittorrent. Isn't that where we all get our movies, albums and games with keygens from?

[Penchum @ Aug 15th 2006 12:56PM]

For those worried about loosing 1 TB of valuable data; you are joking yourself.
You are not going to have that much “Valuable data”. With drive size increasing so fast and the prices dropping so fast you should be able to follow this simple rule: Have not one but two copies of your “Valuable data” on different media or drives and the software to keep all copies updated. I use a program called Handybackup from Handybackup.com. Full featured, simple and inexpensive. I will NEVER suffer from data loss again.

[tekdroid @ Aug 15th 2006 1:33PM]

Rumour has it Tera Patrick has signed up to endorse the first Terabyte drive.

*boom, tish*

[Dan @ Aug 15th 2006 1:50PM]

Thusly do we skate the thin ice of superfluity.

[Lynol @ Aug 15th 2006 2:08PM]

You youngsters never had it so good!

From and IBM history site: "Meanwhile, the price of disk data storage has tumbled dramatically over the years. Users of the 350 RAMAC file paid $130 a month to rent a megabyte of storage"

[The Sound of Speed! @ Aug 15th 2006 3:36PM]

Beautiful typo! I guess to make them any larger, we will have to start looking at super or even hyper speed sonics as an integral part of platter design!

Seriously though, look at HVD on wikipedia if you haven; t heard of it. Holographic storage is the future. And it is close.

[Brandon @ Aug 15th 2006 6:16PM]

1 tb... *whistles* Now that, my friends, is a lot of smut. :D

[Uno @ Aug 15th 2006 6:41PM]

1TB is 1,024 GB, not 1,000.

[zoara @ Aug 16th 2006 9:13AM]

Question is, where's Tommy?

While I'm not old enough to remember the doorframe-sized drives, I am old enough to remember the starry-eyed predictions of Tommy's Terabyte.

"One day - and that may be as soon as 2010 - disk storage will become so cheap per megabyte that consumers may well be installing an entire terabyte (approx one million megabytes) of storage in their machines. One can only imagine the possibilities and the types of data that they might be storing".

Well, I'm imagining most of it will be porn, but there ya go. Some things never change - porn drives everything forwards.

[Artemis @ Aug 18th 2006 5:43PM]

It almost reminds me of the computer I saw... I think it causted about 88k. It can support... 160gb of ram, and has about 7.5 TB of hd space. :P

I think I might get this HD. I'm still using just an 80GB. :P

[GhostDoggy @ Aug 19th 2006 8:48AM]

Currently, Fry's offers $79 250GB WDC drives. I cannot wait for the day the current 750GB drives cost that little. Then I can replace the 5-disks per computer and have 3TB of storage each instad of 1TB of storage each.

Ok, I have a lot of pºrn. lol

[bcarpent1228 @ Aug 31st 2006 9:52AM]

wow - i could have really used that 5mb drive on the 8K Stantec Zebra tube computer i started on - would have saved a lot of paper tape :) :) :)

[holywood @ Sep 29th 2006 3:59PM]

I'm glad to finally hear a date for the 1 TB drive - I've been wondering about that for a while now.

No way will I trust a Hitachi drive with that much of my data - I'll just wait until Seagate releases their 1 TB drive (I'm hoping at around the same time).

[Andy @ Mar 26th 2007 10:25AM]

Hitachi drives are the best made. Hard drives in general are more fragile than eggs and shouldn't be used in anything less than a RAID 6 configuration but Hitachi is the technology leader and the 1TB drive is further proof.