Hitachi announce 1TB hard drive

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/6324109.stm

Personally I find the potential for colossal data loss a little off-putting.

indeed, when the first CD-burners appeared a typical HD was about 400..500MB, so you could backup your whole HD without even being tidy. Even 4 or 8 GB DVD's are a bit skinny compared to today's HD capacities, let alone 1TB !

I agree with the fact that huge drives are a blatant risk.

Hard-drives are not that much more reliable now than what they were years ago - some argue that the larger drives are more prone to failure/error.

Well, a RAID system with auto-backup might be a solution.. after all, how big is the chance that 2 drives crash at the same time?

First thing i thought of when reading this, was, that'll take an age to backup, and what if you lose it, hehe.

Wouldn't be half-bad for large-scale gaming though, since the only thing you backup for them are the save files, and not the game data itself....

I'm curious as to how large each cluster is on that 1TB drive.

Seems to me that drive manafacturers need to focus on speed and efficiency rather than size. Even running RAID-0 I've noticed the bottleneck in my system is the hard drive speed.

having a multi-terrabyte system myself... I love the fact that the drives keep getting larger.

And I've only had 2 drives go totally dead on me in all the years I've had a computer with one (mid 1980s). I've had a few get errors on them and lose a few files... but anyone that doesn't back up their important stuff needs to be smacked around with a cinder-block anyway.

....and what do you back it up onto??

Yeah... don't back up -everything- back up the data you need.

For me. That is my music (Mine and others) some websites and some .docs... thats about it.

Good point hehe

It's the first 1TB drive, therefore it will be expensive so as to limit the number of them that are purchased. Those people who buy them are effectively beta-testing them.

As with any new tech, give it 3-6 months before adopting, if reliability is what you're after.

Aren't 500GB drives the sweet spot for pricing (£ per GB) at the moment anyway? I can see a use for a 1TB drive: small form factor PC's and high-def set top boxes. Personally, 2x500GB will serve me much better than 1x1TB.

...dupe

A terrabyte... call me old school but thats impressive...

When we have 1TB flash drives or any sized flash drive with a 200MB/s transfer rate, then I'll be impressed ;)

Last time I looked the Samsung 400GB was the sweet spot ($109 @ newegg)... Anyway, the great thing about a 1TB drive is that it is bound to lower the prices of the 400 and 500GB models before long as well.

Hehe, I guess that 1 TB HDDs are even too big to put backups on BD-ROM discs. I don't see these taking off too soon, not until Microsoft takes advantage of larger HDDs. For right now, Vista only needs a 40 - 80 GB HDD minimum for Vista. I, myself, have a 160 GB laptop drive, which is a whopping amount of space for a laptop. I mean, Win XP would run great on even a 20 GB HDD with no trouble. It all depends on what types of games DX 10 will allow for, maybe game designers will see these larger drives, and require some steep space now. That has yet to be determined.

$18,000 price? That's insane.

And here's me, happy with the 80 Gig that was obsolete when I
bought it 4 years ago. I've got tons of Mp3 ripped from my CD
collection, I've got massive zip archives from past school
projects, I've got dozens of games installed.

If you need 1TB, you either work in the Movie-Trailer industry
of are terrible at keeping tidy.

Just, wow.

That isn't the price for the 1TB drive.

$18,000 gets you a holographic drive, with 300GB capacity media available at $180 a go.

And don't those holographic drives read data at 100MB/s? I'm sure I recall reading that someplace.

Access times are problably not the best though.

Wow, it shows how well I read that. :)