Last year, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies predicted hard-drive companies would announce 1 terabyte drives by the end of 2006. Hitachi was only off by a few days.
The company said on Thursday that it will come out with a 3.5-inch-diameter 1 terabyte (1TB) drive for desktops in the first quarter, then follow up in the second quarter with 3.5-inch terabyte drives for digital video recorders, bundled with software called Audio-Visual Storage Manager for easier retrieval of data, and corporate storage systems.
The Deskstar 7K1000 will cost $399 (£205.58) when it comes out. That comes to about 40 cents a gigabyte. Hitachi will also come out with a similar 750GB drive. Rival Seagate Technology will come out with a 1TB drive in the first half of 2007. The two companies, along with others, will tout their new drives at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and will show off hybrid hard drives as well.
A terabyte is a trillion bytes, or a million megabytes, or 1,000 gigabytes, as measured by the hard-drive industry. (There are two conventions for calculating megabytes, but this is how the drive industry counts it.) As a reference, the print collection in the Library of Congress comes to about 10TB of information, according to the How Much Information study from UC Berkeley. The report also found that 400,000TB of email get produced per year. About 50,000 trees would be necessary to create enough paper to hold a terabyte of information, according to the report.
Who needs this sort of storage capacity? You will, eventually, said Doug Pickford, director of market and product strategy at Hitachi. Demand for data storage capacity at corporations continues to grow, and it shows no sign of abating. A single terabyte drive takes up less space than four 250GB drives, which lets IT managers conserve on computing-room real estate. The drive can hold about 330,000 3MB photos or 250,000 MP3s, according to Hitachi's maths.
Consumers, meanwhile, are gobbling up more drive capacity because of content such as video. An hour of standard video takes up about 1GB, while an hour of high-definition video sucks up 4GB, Pickford said.
Consumers, though, tend to be sceptical of needing ever more storage capacity.
"We heard that when we brought out 1GB drives," Pickford said.
The boost in capacity for desktop drives comes in part through the introduction of perpendicular recording technology to 3.5-inch-diameter drives. In perpendicular drives, data can be stored in vertical columns, rather than on a single plane. Drive makers have already released notebook drives, which sport smaller 2.5-inch-diameter drives, with perpendicular recording. The 1TB drives will be Hitachi's first 3.5-inch drives with perpendicular recording.
Currently, Hitachi sells 3.5-inch drives that hold 500GB of data, while Seagate has come out with a 750GB data drive.
Drive makers convert to perpendicular recording when the need for areal density, the measure of how much data can be crammed into a square inch, passes 125 gigabits. The terabyte drive (and the 750GB drive) can hold 148 gigabits per square inch, or 148 billion bits. Hitachi's previous 3.5-inch drives maxed out at 115 gigabits per square inch.
The hard drive turned 50 last year, and over the past five decades data capacity has increased at a fairly regular and rapid pace. The first drive, which came with the RAMAC computer, weighed about a ton and held 5MB of data.
Hard-drive scientists say that increases in capacity will continue because of technologies such as heat-assisted recording and patterned media.
Hitachi's 3.5-inch terabyte drive. The initial version will come out for desktops in the first quarter, with subsequent versions tweaked for DVRs (pictured here) and corporate storage devices out in the second quarter
