Remember the day you drooled all over your keyboard when Hitachi introduced a 1TB internal hard drive? Yeah, like a year and a half ago? The outfit's most recent HDD announcement isn't likely to have nearly the same effect, but those who skipped the first-gen version in order to get a more refined product the second go 'round will surely be delighted. Today marks the debut of the 1TB Deskstar 7K1000.B, which goes down as "the world's most energy-efficient 7,200RPM one-terabyte hard drive." Said drive features a new three-disk design which improves idle power consumption up to 43% over its 1TB predecessor, but unfortunately, there's no telling how long you'll have to wait to actually buy this currently unpriced overlord of storage.

[Via PCLaunches]

Iomega's getting quite fed up with listing those GBs, and thus, it's exceptionally thrilled to be offering up a brand new 1TB model for your consideration. Fittingly christened the Super eGo, the external hard drive you see above packs a single one-terabyte HDD, USB 2.0 port and a one-year warranty. Folks who don't care to wait for a 2TB edition can grab one now in ruby red, midnight blue or jet black for $269.95.

We got our hands on ASUS's beefy M70 laptop way back at CES earlier this year, but it looks like the company has just now gotten around to letting the monster loose on the general populace. In case you missed it, this one packs up to one terabyte of storage (in the form of two 500GB drives), along with a 17-inch WUXGA display, your choice of Core 2 Duo processors up to a T9300, ATI Mobile Radeon HD3650 or HD3470 graphics, and an optional Blu-ray drive, among other expectedly top-end features. To make sure no one else but you gets to toy around with all that, ASUS has also seen fit to include not one but two security measures, including the usual fingerprint scanner and ASUS's trademark SmartLogon face-scanning technology. No word on a price, but we're guessing that's a detail best kept on a need to know basis.

[Via PC Launches]

After we heard ASUS stepped into Crazytown with two new terabyte-capacity laptops, we knew we had to swing by the booth and bust out our cameras. It seems like the company has really been stepping up its game both on the design and spec front, with a solid build from the sleek black top and touchpad-integrated media controller, straight on down to the Core 2 Duo CPUs and -- of course -- the ultra-gigantic storage space. Peep the gallery below for a full on tour of the two systems.

We already crunched the numbers: 1TB is a lot. And if you've got $399 to blow, it can be all yours, with Hitachi saying Deskstar 7K1000 shipments have reached "critical mass" this month, after starting out scarce in March. We're guessing if you need one terabyte of data, in a 3.5-inch enclosure, spinning at 7,200 RPM and hooked up to your computer / RAID / iPod, you know who you are, so we won't spend any more time extolling the 7K1000's virtues -- quit your drooling and buy, buy, buy!

You've seen it announced and in the wild, and you've probably been wondering if the $400 or so required to procure the 1TB beast was indeed worth it. Thankfully, TomsHardware has the guidance you've been yearning for, as it opened up its test bench and welcomed Hitachi's 7K1000 with open arms. The 935.5GB of usable space brought smiles to all involved, provided the highest transfer rate of all 7,200RPM drives that it was benchmarked against, and it was even said to "outperform the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10." Truthfully, it was difficult to find any negatives on the behemoth in terms of sheer performance aside from its (forgivable) inability to keep up with the 10,000RPM WD Raptor and its toasty nature, but the reality set in when the review crew began to evaluate the value presented in such a dense, albeit expensive, HDD. Frankly, reviewers claimed that picking this drive up over a pair of cheaper 500GB drives "wouldn't make a lot of sense," but if you're in dire need of cramming 1TB of, um, PowerPoint presentations onto a single unit, it's far from a bad option.

[Via DigitalMediaThoughts]

Late last year, HP hit us up with its first venture into the world of NAS, and just as Q1 winds down and Q2 impatiently begins, the outfit is hoping to attract the attention of up and coming small business owners. The StorageWorks Media Vault Pro is one of the dozen or so products briefly (and we do mean briefly) introduced in its latest small biz lineup, and aside from the elegant image we left to stare at, we really don't know much else. Reportedly, the drive ratchets up to 1TB in size, will ring up just under a grand, and provides the obligatory "expandable network storage and enhanced protection services" that all the competitors do, but alas, we've no idea when HP plans on launching these things into hectic startup offices.

[Via TGDaily]

Somehow, in a world of 300GB holographic discs being packaged with cereal boxes -- OK, maybe we're not quite there yet -- a 1TB optical disc doesn't sound too terribly far fetched. However, Mempile's upcoming TeraDisc technology deserves no scoffing, with its 100 virtual layers for storage at a "fraction of the price" of other storage solutions on the market. Currently the disc can store 500GB in a transparent disc the thickness of a DVD, but future optimizations will allow for 200 layers of data, with 5GB on each layer, for a whole terabyte of good times. The capacity improvements come from the fact that the disc is transparent, so the laser doesn't have to bounce off of anything, it just goes right through. Right now the technology is still in development, but "strategic agreements" are already in place with media and device manufacturers, so all we've got to worry about is where to store all these cute kitten pics of ours while we're waiting for these discs to hit shelves.

Look out folks, as just one month after Buffalo cranked the NAS ante up to 3TB, we've got a new kid on the block holding down the mighty four-oh. MicroNet's Platinum NAS 4.0 indeed packs a whopping 4,000GB on just four SATA hard drives, and while the company didn't go out of its way to divulge exactly which units were stuffed within, we've all got our hunch. Regardless, this device also features 256MB of write-back / write-through error correcting cache memory, Windows / OS X / Linux compatibility, RAID 0/1/5 support, an Intel XScale 64-bit network storage processor, dual-channel gigabit Ethernet connectivity, a lightweight aluminum design, and it even consumes about "one-third less power" than similar alternatives. Cleverly, MicroNet only asserted that the 1TB edition would hit in Q2 for $879, but we're confident the flagship version will tack on quite a premium for all its capaciousness.

[Via MacWorld]

Whatever your reasons, we're sure just about everyone could envision a way to fill up a single terabyte of hard drive space, and while achieving such a milestone in one machine has long been available via a bevy of internal drives, Hitachi's 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 drive has made things a lot simpler. Not waiting around for prices to plummet, Dell is touting itself as the world's first pre-fab PC maker to offer up the ginormous HDD in its machines, initially selling it within the cases of the Alienware-branded rigs and ensuring the XPS beasts follow suit shortly. Currently, Alienware is offering up the 1TB drive for $500 above the price of the included 250GB SATA HDD, so if you've got the means, now you've got the option.

Reports of advances in memory storage densities aren't all that surprising anymore -- after all, storage devices have continually gotten both smaller and more capacious since IBM kicked out the first hard drive in 1956 -- but it's still nice to learn that the NAND flash used in our DAPs, cellphones, and soon laptops and desktops will break the terabyte barrier within the next decade. Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the National Nano Fab Center are claiming success in building the world's first NAND flash chip using an 8nm fabrication process, which could eventually lead to capacities as large as one terabyte in a package 1/25th the size of Samsung's 40nm 32GB unit. The breakthrough was realized by merging nanowires with silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon technology, and although it might seem like huge iPods are right around the corner, the research team still faces problems such as shrinking the area where data is saved. In other words, your gear isn't out of date quite yet, but you can rest assured that it will be soon.

[Via China View]

We already knew Hitachi was planning to unveil 20GB Microdrives and perpendicular notebook drives in 2007, but now the HDD giant is one upping itself by adding some juicy details about next year's 2.5-inch hard drive roadmap. Aside from offering both 5400 and 7200RPM units "in the quarter-terabyte range," next year's Travelstar lineup will likely boast "hybrid" technology in order to conserve battery life, enable zippier bootup times / recovery from hibernation, and provide "greater reliability and higher performance" -- oh, and it's seemingly a requirement to rock Windows Vista Premium (on a laptop), too. Moreover, the firm is touting its "HDD-level encryption solution" as being "virtually impenetrable" (read: fuel for a hacker's fire) and it reportedly won't bog your machine down the way similar software-based security applications will; Hitachi's version "scrambles data using a password-generated key" as the data is written, and then descrambled with the key as it is retrieved using the highly-touted Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm. Consumers can expect 7200RPM 200GB flavor to be available in "the first half" of 2007, while the larger (albeit slower) 5400RPM 250GB edition should land in notebooks before the year's end.

[Via CNET, thanks resource]

Okay, so there's no magic product (yet) that will literally burn three terabytes onto a writeable CD, but Harvard researchers are certainly getting closer to making it happen. The group has developed an "optical nano antenna" that's built onto an inexpensive, off-the-shelf antenna in order to bypass that pesky diffraction limit that prevents current lasers from focusing light onto a smaller spot than half its native wavelength. By utilizing two gold "nano rods" separated by a 30 nanometer gap, they have devised a method for a laser sporting an 830 nanometer wavelength to focus its beam onto a 40 nanometer area, allowing for mind boggling amounts of data to be written to an optical disc. While the integrity of the burn is more than sketchy using such a high resolution beam, the team of engineers are hard at work trying to improve and perfect the space-saving process. Until then, we suppose we're still stuck paying an arm and a leg (or two) for those spacious, burnable Blu-ray / HD DVD discs.

[Thanks, Adam]

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.