1 TB Consumer Hard Drives to Hit Shelves

1TB drives getting ready to hit the streets
1/5/2007 1:28:21 PM, by Jacqui Cheng

It seems the day of the 1-terabyte consumer hard drive has finally become a reality. Hitachi announced yesterday, just before the start of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, that it will be shipping a 1TB hard drive by the end of the first quarter in 2007. The drive will be the first of three that the company is expecting to release in 2007; the other two are aimed at video pros and the enterprise market. Those two will ship in the second quarter of the year.

[CGT NOTE: 1 TB is 1000 GB or 1,000,000 MB. Big (for now)! (Actually 1024GB or 1,048,576 MB)]

The 3.5" Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 will run at 7200 rpm, have a 32MB buffer, and be available as SATA 3.0Gb/s or Parallel-ATA 133. The company did not max out on areal density on the drives though; instead of trying to cram 250GB onto four platters, Hitachi opted to go with a 200GB-per-platter, five-platter approach. Hitachi's director of market and product strategy Doug Pickford told PC World that "About 250GB per platter is the next bump on the areal density curve, but we've backed off from doing that in order to achieve higher reliability at this time." Entire article here.