The First 1 Tera Byte Hard Disk Drive

Whoaa hard disk evolution moving so fast. 1TB hard disk in PC ?? So amazing. In past few year, having 80GB of hard disk gives me so much storage to store my movie, games, music, program and data. But now 1 TB ? WTF.

Here is the review from PCMagz

At first blush, the idea of a terabyte hard drive seems almost ludicrous. Who needs that much storage? Anyone asking that question is probably just running a few office apps and browsing the web. Anyone with any substantial quantity of digital media automatically gets it. On our primary home system, we have a 500GB RAID 1 array, with only about 130GB free—and that's only with constant monitoring, uninstalling bulky games, and limiting the amount of digital media stored on the system.

Our home network houses a terabyte RAID 5 array, with five 200GB hard drives. Since it's RAID 5, the array has "only" 770GB or so of effective space—and it's 70% full. Some of that, of course, has to do with work-related stuff. There's a dedicated volume just for benchmarks, which takes up several hundred gigabytes by itself. Increasingly, however, large digital media files—photos, video, music, and games—take up vast amounts of drive space. So a terabyte hard drive begins to feel like a necessity, not just a luxury—for some of us, at any rate.

* Hard Drive Product Guide
* A Terabyte's Worth of Storage—Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 (ExtremeTech)
* Buyers' Guide: External Hard Drives

Let's take a look at the first terabyte hard drive, the Deskstar 7K1000 from Hitachi Global Storage, and see just how it performs. For an impressive $399 ($0.39/gig), is it worth your bucks?

Hitachi is the first to market with a 1TB hard drive, using the company's perpendicular recording technology. The technology is similar to Seagate's 750GB 7200.10. Perpendicular recording orients the tiny magnetic domains vertically, with one orientation representing binary zeros and the opposite representing binary 1's.

Even so, Hitachi needs five platters and ten heads to hit 1TB. Having that many heads can have an impact on issues like noise and power draw. For example, the 750GB version of the drive is rated at 30dB while seeking; the 1TB sibling generates 32dB.

Still, one terabyte is a milestone. Let's take a look at the rated specs for Hitachi's latest progeny.