Terabyte Drive to Debut Later this Year

mytrip writes to mention the news that Hitachi will be releasing a terabyte storage drive this year. "These large drives also will get incorporated into televisions and personal video recorders. Hitachi, among others, already sells TVs with integrated hard drives in Japan and other markets. While large drives start out expensive, the price drops relatively quickly. Computer makers pay something in the 30-cent range for a gigabyte when buying hard drives, Healy said. The price at retail is around 50 cents or less."

TB is fine but..

[eebra82]

We always hear about AMD and Intel giving out tons of information on roadmaps and what we're expected to see in the near future but hard drive development is a relatively silent business. Does anyone know what we can expect to see in tomorrow's hard drives? What's scheduled for the next two years?

Measuring the amount of TB in future disks is easy. The capacity doubles every x months and so and that's probably not going to change for some time, so I frankly don't care too much about hard drive space as it has never been an issue to me. What I do care about is the other technology inside of a hard drive. Seek times, write/read speed and throughput. How's that going? Are we eventually going to see some major difference between SATA150 and SATA300? If so, when?

I am not sure about you guys but I am growing increasingly dependent on fast hard drives rather than a shitload of space. My workstations are usually bundled with a fast Raptor disk combined with a Seagate at some 250 to 500 GB, so I put the big who-cares-about-speed files on the big one while my operating system, applications and games rest on my Raptor.

So once again, does anyone know what we're going to see in 2007 and 2008?

RPM more important

[onlyjoking]

Is anyone else tired of hearing about yet another x00Gb extra storage capacity while the the RPM remains the same as it has for the last 5/6 years, ie. 7200rpm. When are we going to see affordable 10,000rpm disks fer kreissake? The 150Gb WD Raptor at £175 is not what I call competitive pricing. We have more than enough storage. What we need is faster, energy-efficient disks.

Re:RPM more important

[timeOday]

Higher density does translate to higher transfer rate, since you read more with each revolution. I fired up an old 8.5 GB 7200 rpm drive the other day and was surprised it only pushes 10 MB/s. That would be pathetic nowadays. My laptop drive, which is also 7200 rpm, gives 50 MB/s on the same benchmark.

Granted, access times probably haven't declined like transfer rates.