Buffalo joins Hitachi in the 1TB HDD club

Perpendicular magnetic recording has brought us storage densities beyond our wildest dreams (well, anything above 640KB is pretty amazing, actually), with Buffalo today joining Hitachi in the exclusive, highly-sought after 1TB 3.5-inch hard drive club. Besides the now-legendary 7K1000, consumers will soon have the chance to pick up a nearly-1,024GB platter known as the almost-impossible-to-remember HD-H1.0TFBS2/3G, which features the same 7200 RPM / 3.0Gbps speeds that we've become accustomed to. Japan will see this one first -- sometime around the end of the month -- for about ¥60,165, so expect an eventual street price of under $500 when these finally spin their way stateside. As for us, we're gonna hold off for the time being, because surely this flood of terabytes means that 1PB models are right around the corner.

[mb @ Apr 11th 2007 2:46PM]

1024GB? I doubt it. HDD manufacturers still don't understand how 2^n works : (

[Phil Perman @ Apr 11th 2007 3:28PM]

Well they're not really to blame, they just use the base 10 number system that has been around for thousands of years. Its computers that do if different'y, using base 2.

Its a mild inconvenience, but you don't end up with a huge amount less than what you expect, particularly when you ave nearly 1TB to play with, I doubt the average person would even notice

[mb @ Apr 11th 2007 3:32PM]

Well, by definition, you lose more capacity exponentially as the falsely reported capacity goes up.

[mb @ Apr 11th 2007 3:33PM]

And they are to blame. They've done this on purpose for a while.

[Gil @ Apr 11th 2007 4:05PM]

They do it on purpose. Back in the day I bought a 4.3GB HDD and it was 46 170 898 432 bytes not 43 000 000 000 bytes

[KazO @ Apr 11th 2007 4:01PM]

Well, considering Buffalo doesn't make drives, it's probably just a repackaged Deskstar (which that pic resembles; what's with the fuzzy? Japanese pr0n?). The real question is when is someone else going to release one? Since HGST is the only mfr doing 5-platter drives, everyone else will have to develop 250Gb platters before that happens.

[steve @ Apr 11th 2007 4:14PM]

I don't get it, Hitachi's version is out first and costs about $100 less, why would anyone buy this instead?

[Revrant2394 @ Apr 11th 2007 9:11PM]

Because Hitachi isn't nearly as trusted due to their Notebook HDs being the crash-masters for our favorite kind of lap friendly PC?(Or at least until those Batteries explode, anyhow)

[Cupajo @ Apr 11th 2007 4:17PM]

peanut butter?

[Rat Bastard @ Apr 11th 2007 5:01PM]

Agree with KazO here, gotta be a Hitachi rebadge. I mean, who the crap is Buffalo that they have a terabyte drive out before Seagate, WD, and Maxtor? Get on it, chums!

[ShortFuse @ Apr 11th 2007 5:32PM]

Buffalo Tech is well known for their NAS drives (#1 really), but even their NAS drives use Western Digitals