RSSHitachi to Debut 1-Terabyte Drive at CES
By Ed Oswald | Published January 6, 2007, 12:31 AM
Hitachi introduced the first commercially available one-terabyte hard drive on Friday, delivering on a promise made nearly two years ago. The drive uses perpendicular recording technology in order to store data.
The Deskstar 7K1000 is slated to beginning shipping in the first quarter of this year at a retail price of $399 USD, or about 40 cents per gigabyte. In addition, Hitachi will also release a version of the 1TB drive, called the CinemaStar, aimed at the burgeoning DVR market.
Putting the size into perspective: 500 full-length standard definition movies would fit, or 250 hours of HD programming, or even 250,000 hours of digital music.
The milestone also comes at the 50-year anniversary of the hard drive itself, and comes some 15 years after the industry was able to break the 1-gigabyte barrier.
"In the 51st year, Hitachi is leading a new era for hard drives -- not only providing large amounts of affordable storage, but also customizing and optimizing hard drives to deliver products that are smarter, more durable and more useful to the consumer," chief marketing officer Shinjiro Iwata said.
Hitachi beats Seagate, who is also developing a similar drive, to the 1TB level by several months. Seagate said late Thursday that it planned to have its own drive available within the first half of 2007, also based on perpendicular recording technology.
Seagate had previously held the record for the largest commercially available hard drive, a 750-gigabyte unit released in April of this year. However, the drive came at a hefty $559 USD price tag.
Such large drives may seem gluttonous, however Hitachi sees things different. It points to the increasing need to store all types of data, especially video, which can take up gigabytes of space for a single file. Additionally, with digital video recorders ever more popular, there is an increasing need for larger yet cost-effective HDD solutions.
"Consumers who increasingly rely on hard disk drives to store their digital memories are seeking higher capacity and more reliable HDDs," said John Rydning, research manager for hard disk drives at IDC.
iSuppli senior storage analyst Krishna Chander seems to agree, although points out that the drives would likely find a huge market in consumer PCs for at least a half a decade if not more.
"For exciting new products and applications like home gateways, media-center PCs, High Definition movie downloads, HD Set-Top Boxes and HD Digital Video Recorders, a 1Tbyte HDD fits the bill nicely, both in terms of capacity and cost," Chander added.
iSuppli said it expects shipments of hard drives for non-computing applications to grow at a much faster rate than for PCs. Whereas growth there from 2005 to 2010 is expected to be around 10.6 percent, non-computing hard drive shipments would increase 22.8 percent.
Anyone know what interface these are using?
All I can find is that 3 versions will be available, but only one is being released in the first quarter.
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|Answering my own question...
http://www.engadget.com/...ive-barrier-with-7k1000/
And just in case anyone needs to know how Perpendicular Recording works, this is the worlds cheesiest Flash Animation to explain it...
http://www.hitachigst.co...endicularAnimation.html
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|If it doesnt have flash memory on the drive it is already obsolete. Vista talks directly to these flash drives. USB flash drives are about to ride the wave in sales.
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|and what Vista does is the future in computers right?
have you seen the price of flash memory?
$40/GB vs. $0.50/GB
i think magnetic storage will be around for a while yet.
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|You are correct that flash memory will not completely replace magnetic storage anytime soon, but all future hard drives should have a non volatile flash memory cache instead of the current type of 8MB-16MB cache that loses all of its data whenever the computer is turned off.
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|and what Vista does is the future in computers right?
Yes. For the next 3 years or so, anyway, until Fiji(Vista R2)/Vienna.
While you may dislike MS and everything related to 'em, they do, in fact, drive the market.
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|Actually, you can get 1GB usb flash drives at newegg for less than $15 at newegg; and hard drives for as low as $0.30/GB.
Either way, the original poster was talking about the hybrid drives with flash caches. So giving a 400GB harddrive a 1GB flash cache would only add $15 to the cost, maybe $20-$25 if you include engineering costs.
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|How long would it take to defragment one of these?
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|Hopefully, with that much space, there shouldn't be too many fragments.
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|10 of those please ;)
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|I'm still waiting for zetabyte drives. :)
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|Did you mean Yetabyte drives? Or is this yet another "let's define the most ridiculously large amount of data that we will never see for another decade or so ...just for fun" term?
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|gretamegabrytes plx
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|Sounds like a cereal :p
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|I can't wait for godobyte drives to come out. =)
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|Its great for businesses, we store a lot of data mostly archive, 1 TB would be awesome instead of 3 tapes I can store the same data on 1 hard drive and its easily accessible.
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|The technology is fantastic. Why not if it can be done. I have two 74GB drives running a 10,000 RPMs. More than enough space for me. It is the speed not the capacity that I am interested in. But that is just me not the public.
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|No reason you can't have both. Run your operating system from a small but fast 10k RPM drive while using a second high capacity drive for storage. :)
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|Your right I could. But I just don't need the space right now. With Windows Vista on the horizon, I made need to upgrade to larger capacity drives in the future. 15k RPM SATA drives would be nice right now though. It would be very expensive though, and I am not made of money.
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|A man after my own heart...
Right now I have 4 36GB 15K Ultra-320 drives in RAID0...and it's still not fast enough.
The Windows 2003 Server install went pretty damn quick though. That file copy bar flew.
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|I paid $600.00 for my 20 meg.. yes Meg hard drive for my atari 1040 ST in the late 80s and I remember a friend spent $1,000.00 on the fist 1GB hard drive in the early 90's.... Now they are the size of a postage stamp. Its amazing how storage grows..
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|My first notebook, back in 1995, a Toshiba Tecra510CDT was $5,100. It came with a state of the art 2GB hard drive, which was 20% of the cost. The funny part is, it still boots up, the battery still takes a charge, but only lasts for about 30 min.
I managed to get WinME to work on it even though it's only a 133Mhz processor. At the time, the Tecra710 boasted the fastest clock speed on the planet.....200Mhz.
Now, my tiny MicroSD card has 2GB and there will be a 4GB and 8GB Micro out shortly.
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|Only $400? Man... I paid almost that much for my external 500GB drive a year ago.
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|I paid that for a WD 1 TB external a week ago.
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|I'll wait for the 1TB Seagate.
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|"I'll wait for the 1TB Seagate."
/signed
I just can't make myself buy a Hitachi drive. I give everything 3 or so chances, and Hitachi used all 3 in one year - was unbelievable. Seagate for me all the way.
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|Agreed. I am a Seagate loyalist. They haven't let me down yet. =)
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|I like Western Digital. I've never had any problems with them. Very smooth.
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|i cant imagine using a TB. what nonsense. if it fails you lose a TB of data
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|i cant imagine using a TB
I can. And no, I'm not a pirate.
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|RAID 1 (mirror them)
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|Anybody with half a brain who has a lot of important information on thier PC, usually has secondary HD installed.
Once a week, I backup all of my critical data to a secondary drive, which is simply plugged into the IDE open socket.
It's always safer to keep your data on an HD without an O/S.
I wouldn't want to rely on a single 1 TB drive though. USB hard drives are great and relatively cheap.
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|By not buying a 1TB hard drive you have already lost that data since you have no place to store it and can't get it in the first place. ;-)
Having a large hard drive does not mean you have to have to immediately fill it up, and besides that you can lose important files no matter if it's a 1TB hard drive or a 1MB floppy disk. There's been one rule to follow for as long as computers have been around. Back up your data. A hard drive can fail at any time with absolutely no warning at all.
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|I can't imagine 1MB...if it fails, you lose a MB of data...
*shakes head*
You sir, are brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
Note: I may be confused on the meaning of the word, brilliant.
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|Heh...more a "digital pack-rat"
I still have DOS 6.2 sitting in my OS installs folder. Just can't bring myself to delete it, and my ability to retain backups is laughable. They tend to get lost or over-written quite quickly.
A 1 TB drive (or better, 2 of them, mirrored) would be a much better solution for me.
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|It's not that difficult. You simply expand on the things you use your drive for. For instance, I copy much of the Season Pass shows I watch on my Tivo to my PC now. I have an unlimited subscription to Virgin Digital, I download whatever the hell I want - like 1 song, download every album by and with that singer, just because I can. Back in 1994, I couldn't imagine using 2gb. Back in 2004, I couldn't imagine using 750gb. Now? I can imagine using everything. Right now I have 1 400, 1 300, 1 200 and 2 120s. The 400 is backup, the 300 is with my Tivo/Mp3s etc, the 200 has games and the 120s are raid for speed. Once you have it, you'll use it - trust me.
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|This is a nice step but I think 4 250GB drives are better for 1 reason - backup and risk to your data. If you have a 1TB drive fail on you and its full? Ouch.... Atleast with say 2 500GB drives or such you will have less chance of not losing ALL data. They need to come out with 2TB backup tapes ;) that are affordable ;)
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|4 250 gig drives and 4 1 TB drive are the same as far as RAID is concerned, except rebuilt rate.
If you care about your data you invest in RAID + Backup solution. Nothing changes really as the size increases.
As for tape backups, a lot of people have started migrating to removable HDD's for their offsite storage, alas, this comes with it's own gotchyas...
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|Unfortunately, I doubt we will ever see 2TB on a single tape cartridge because nobody is investing heavily in tape R&D anymore. Even if you're talking about 2TB compressed which is how every vendor specifies their capacity, that's substantially more than the rare DLT-S4 (1.6TB compressed) and a lot more than LTO-3 (0.8TB compressed) which most people would consider the current mainstream high end.
If a 1TB disk is going to cost $399 retail at the time of introduction, then I would guess that by 2010, those drives will cost roughly the same as LTO-3 cartridges cost today. The writing is on the wall; even though tape will always have certain advantages over disk for multigenerational backup purposes, the one which counts most (cost) is being wiped out rapidly. In many environments already, people either don't care or don't understand multigenerational backup so tape is clearly headed for extinction.
As for your 4x250GB array (presumably JBOD), I think you're assuming that the appeal of a 1TB drive is strictly for the purpose of having a single drive. Personally, I'm excited about the prospect of putting three of these 1TB drives in 2TB RAID-5 array for under $2K with controller.
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|This is why I don't rely on my hard drive for important stuff at all, regardless of how large it is. All of my important files go straight to a DVD-RAM cartridge or DVD-R. I still copies of them on my hard drive for convenience but if it fails I don't lose anything.
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|So the only pro for 4x250GB is incremental failure points?
Well the cons are heat, noise, space, power req, and ease of use.
It's easy to fix one solution with a backup. Not sure it's so easy to fix the other solution. ;)
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|Speed...? Of course, then your incremental points of failure fall apart.
*shrug*
RAID 0+1?
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|4 1TB in RAID 5. 3TB of useable space for data and 1TB for parity incase of failures. yay!
or for those that couldn't afford that. 2 1TB RAID 1. Yay for wasted space for redundancy.
May be impractical for you to have a 1TB drive, but for people in the video editing business, it's very useful.
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