Hitatchi drive lives in Alienware's 'Area 51' game-oriented machines

Updated: 7:51 p.m. ET April 9, 2007

Just when you got used to hard drives with hundreds of gigabytes (hundreds of billions of bytes) they do it: make one with a terabyte (a trillion bytes).

YES, you can now get a terabyte hard drive on a desktop PC. Breaking the ice with a Hitachi drive was Dell, with “Area 51” game-oriented machines from its Alienware subsidiary. The 1T option initially costs $500.

In CASE you’re wondering, as printed text a terabyte would occupy 100 million reams of paper, consuming some 50,000 trees. It is enough to hold 16 days (not hours) of DVD-quality video, or a million pictures, or almost two years worth of continuous music.

ou might not have any songs that last for two years, but that’s irrelevant, indicated Henry Baltazar, storage analyst for The 451 Group, a technology analyst firm in San Francisco. “There will be a demand for it, since a lot of people have digital media, like movies, pictures and music,” Baltazar told LiveScience.

“Larger devices will BECOME more commonplace, and we will see the same kind of transition from gigabyte to terabyte drives as we previously saw from megabyte to gigabyte drives—in fact, the move from 500 gigabytes to a terabyte has taken longer than expected.”

The leap from 500G to 1T required a breakthrough in “areal density” (how tight the bytes are packed on the surface of the disk), according to Doug Pickford, a marketing executive at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. The trick, he explained, was to move to Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), where each BIT is a perpendicular rather than a linear magnetized spot on the disk—as if the bits were standing up rather than lying down.

Currently, areal density is growing at about 35 to 40 percent per year, and the techniques used to create the 1T drive are expandable to make a 5T drive, Pickford said. More work will be needed to surpass the 5T hurdle, but he foresaw no physical limitations until drives reach a capacity of at least 50T. ( there is a picture of the Alienware case on this link, thats about it)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18025952/

How long would it take to defrag? I suppose, once a year, you could start the defrag then go on vacation. or reformat the buggerWith a SATA 500GB HDD it doesn't seem to take more than a few hours to defrag / format. I would *assume* that a 1TB drive would be 5-9 hours. Once someone gets a 1TB drive he/she will need to let us all know.

Pretty amazing that we're already getting into the 1TB range. Few more years and we'll be saying how amazing it is that we're into the 1PB (Petabyte) range. By that time at it's current rate maybe Windows well require 1TB of disk space. lol most likely if they arent already working on it right now as we speakI can't wait for "yaddabites"... I literally choked when I read this article. Yottabytes will be cool, but I don't forsee that coming unless you have a hard drive the size of an old mainframe. I don't recall Hitachi as being the most trustworthy brand to ever be conceived. Including Toshiba.