Cnet reports:
Last year, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies predicted hard-drive companies would announce 1 terabyte drives by the end of 2006. Hitachi was only off by a few days.
The company said on Thursday that it will come out with a 3.5-inch-diameter 1 terabyte drive for desktops in the first quarter, then follow up in the second quarter with 3.5-inch terabyte drives for digital video recorders, bundled with software called Audio-Visual Storage Manager for easier retrieval of data, and corporate storage systems.
Hitachi terabyte drives
The Deskstar 7K1000 will cost $399 when it comes out. That comes to about 40 cents a gigabyte. Hitachi will also come out with a similar 750GB drive. Rival Seagate Technology will come out with a 1 terabyte drive in the first half of 2007.
I’m drooling over the size of this drive.
That’s enough room to hold 250,000 Mp3 files – or as CNet puts it – enough music to play continuously for two years without ever repeating.
The article also reports that the entire Library of Congress could be held on 10 terabytes.
This comes after the 50th birthday of the original hard drive last year.
The original weighed a ton and held 5 MB.
UPDATE: As of August 2011 I now have a two terabyte hard drive sitting on my desk that I purchased earlier this year for less than $125. As of today, you can buy the same drive for less than $90 from Amazon. The times they are a changing.