Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is first to the mat with an announcement of a 1-terabyte hard disk drive. Industry analysts widely expected a 1TB drive to ship sometime in 2007;
According to
Industry Milestone
"No question, it's a milestone for the industry," says John Rydning, research manager for hard disk drives and components at IDC. "It's interesting that the industry is delivering a 1TB drive in the 51st year of the industry." The first hard drive, manufactured by IBM, shipped in 1956.
Hitachi notes it took the industry 35 years to reach 1GB (in 1991), 14 years more to reach 500GB (in 2005), and just two more years to reach 1TB.
The company hopes to be the first to market with a 1TB drive. The company is locked in competition with Seagate for those honors; Seagate reconfirmed its intentions to ship a 1TB drive in the first half of 2007, but it has not offered any further details.
Drive Details
Although the jump to 1TB was not unexpected,
The Deskstar 7K1000 will be a five-platter drive, each platter capable of storing 200GB apiece. Like Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 750GB drive,
Pickford says the drive will be intended for gaming and high-performance PCs, external storage devices, and PC upgrades. "The drive will be shipping in the first quarter to retail stores," says Pickford. "And we're expecting to ship some to external storage device makers as well."
The 7200 rpm Serial-ATA drive will have 32MB data buffer, larger than the typical 8MB or 16MB buffer seen on drives. It will be available in SATA 3.0Gb/s and Parallel-ATA 133 interfaces.
750GB Model Also Coming
In addition to the 1TB model,
Getting to 1TB, adds Pickford, was more about finessing existing processes than inventing new ones. "It was very much in the execution, so you can have the right yields, the right stability, and right quality levels, and make sure it's achievable in the lab as well as in mass production."
Attractive Pricing
With a price of $399, the Deskstar 7K1000 comes in at an attractive price for consumers. That works out to $0.40 per GB--a competitive per-gigabyte cost for a hard drive today, and not much of a premium over previous models. By comparison, a 500GB hard drive today costs about $0.45 per gigabyte, as does Seagate's 750GB Barracuda drive (down from the $0.79 per gigabyte it cost when it launched last spring).
Don't expect to see hard drive prices enter a freefall, though. Says Pickford, "I don't think it will affect the market in a disruptive way. When we set this, we did try to take into account the price of other, lower-capacity drive products. Based on where the market was, we felt $399 was an appropriate price point to set for this technology, so it could achieve good market acceptance."
Although 1TB of storage on a single drive will be alluring to some users, IDC's Rydning sees only very specific demand for that much storage. "For consumers, we still think the big hard drives are mainly for niche applications," says Rydning. "There's going to be a certain minority of PC users and video recorder enthusiasts who will want to have the highest capacity available. And in those markets, a high-capacity drive is valued. However, the vast majority of PC users are still serviced by a one-platter, 160GB hard drive."
Consumers' increasing accumulation of digital personal data is, not surprisingly, driving the need for high-capacity storage. "As people amass their own personal memories, either in photographs or video, hard disk drive storage is one of the best, lowest cost ways to store and retrieve that type of data," says Rydning.
About TERABYTE
A terabyte (derived from the prefix tera- and commonly abbreviated TB) is a measurement term for data storage capacity. The value of a terabyte is based upon a decimal radix (base 10) and is defined as one trillion (short scale) bytes, or 1000 gigabytes.
The number of bytes in a terabyte is sometimes stated to be approximately 1.0995 x 1012. This difference arises from a conflict between the long standing tradition of using binary prefixes and base 2 in the computer world, and the more popular decimal (SI) standard adopted widely both within and without the computer industry. Standards organizations such as IEC, IEEE and ISO recommend to use the alternative term tebibyte (TiB) to signify the traditional measure of 10244 bytes, or 1024 gibibytes, leading to the following definitions:
- According to the SI standard and current usage, a terabyte (TB) contains 1,000,000,000,000 bytes = 10004 or 1012 bytes.
- According to traditional and binary arithmetic, a terabyte contained 1,099,511,627,776 bytes = 10244 or 240 bytes. Ambiguity can be avoided by use of the standardized term for this quantity, the tebibyte.
The capacities of computer storage devices are traditionally advertised using their SI standard values.
| Decimal | ||
|---|---|---|
| Value | SI | |
| 10001 | k | kilo |
| 10002 | M | mega |
| 10003 | G | giga |
| 10004 | T | tera |
| 10005 | P | peta |
| 10006 | E | exa |
| 10007 | Z | zetta |
| 10008 | Y | yotta |
| Binary | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Value | JEDEC | IEC | ||
| 10241 | K | kilo | Ki | kibi |
| 10242 | M | mega | Mi | mebi |
| 10243 | G | giga | Gi | gibi |
| 10244 | T | tera | Ti | tebi |
| 10245 | P | peta | Pi | pebi |
| 10246 | E | exa | Ei | exbi |
| 10247 | Z | zetta | Zi | zebi |
| 10248 | Y | yotta | Yi | yobi |
For more Visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte
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