Hitachi promises first 1TB hard disk drive this quarter

[Bob Crabtree]

The computer world has been watching and waiting for the launch of the first one terabyte (1TByte) hard disk drive and it's now in sight, Hitachi having promised at CES 2007 to introduce the Deskstar 7K1000 before the end of March at a suggested price in the USA of $399.

Find out more.

[Funkstar]

This is really going to push the price of Seagates 750gig drive down. From a quick look at BestBuy the list price for it is still $399, disconted to $329 so the price per gig is a lot higher than the Hitachi

[kojak71]

Seagate have been able to get away with charging whatever they wanted for their 750Gb monster because it had no competitor in that market.

[Lee @ SCAN]

Home NAS Servers anyone ?

With the release of these drives and windows home server it seems to quite the year for building NAS and digital content storage for the home user.

It's about time if you asked me

[kempez]

I'm just waiting for when a company offers a hard drive that actually doesn't bottleneck a modern system

[Funkstar]

Lee i'd love to build a massive NAS unit with a bunch of these, but i have nowhere to store it to keep it quiet

[chuckskull]

Spotted this the other day. depending on the final price you might see my 4 250gig driv3es in the FS forum soon

[Bob Crabtree]

What I can helping thinking about, though, is the issue of backing up drives as big as this.

I already find it a problem when trying to backup drives of up to 320GB but, really, you need a drive of 5TB or bigger to work out any sort of practical backup strategy, or perhaps, a RAID containing a whole bunch of 1TB drives.

That said, I'll take as many 1TB drives as I can carry - and, since they're in 3.5in form-factor, I reckon that would be quite a few.

Here, though, what I'd most like a 1TB drive for, is to backup all the other drives I have.

[Funkstar]

But do you actually have 1TB of data you want to back up?

If i was to build a RAID array out of these, i wouldn't bother trying to back it all up (RAID is not a substiture for backups). It would be filled with .iso images of DVDs that i could play through media systems all round a house. Yes it would be a pain to have to archive them all again, but certainally do-able. It's not like i have 4TB+ of original content.

[Hans Voralberg]

Imagine if it fails, I'd commit suicide lol. Anyhow, 1T is awesome

[Bob Crabtree]

Originally Posted by Funkstar

But do you actually have 1TB of data you want to back up?

No not data in the sense of, say, MS Word docs, not at all, even when I factor in digital camera still images - though LOTS of serious photographers might well do.

What I do have, though, is the need to do backups of LOTS of hard disks.

At a quick count, that includes 10 boot partitions across six PCs.

But it does NOT include any of the many PCs that pass through my hands during the course of a year, each of which I backup completely before I do anything else.

Now depending on why and how I back up, it's possible I may have multiple versions of a number of those boot partitions (so you can quickly get back to a clean state or a known configuration).

It's also possible that I might make a series of backups all of which I want to keep, either permanently or for a few months.

Add all that lot up and you can see why having a BIG drive to backup my backups would be very welcome.

Originally Posted by Funkstar

If i was to build a RAID array out of these, i wouldn't bother trying to back it all up (RAID is not a substiture for backups). It would be filled with .iso images of DVDs that i could play through media systems all round a house. Yes it would be a pain to have to archive them all again, but certainally do-able. It's not like i have 4TB+ of original content.

RAID can be an effective element in a backup strategy but you are right, it's not bullet proof - nothing is - and the more you put on one drive (or RAID) the more you stand to lose if it goes belly up.

Truth is, I'd probably survive if I lost everything, including my backups but for some people it would be a disaster.

A friend of mine is a marine photographer who has gone digital and his on-disc library of images is not only his income, it will be his pension in years to come.

If he lost those digital images, he'd still have a huge number of negatives and slides, because the transition has only been happening in the last few years but I think you get the picture. Cough!

[machinist]

Love this, been waiting for this for my media centre PC

[Funkstar]

Sounds like a 1TB drive would be very useful to you Bob, but if you have a large drive of various drive images, that data isn't going to change very much. You could easily a second external 1TB drive and duplicate your working drive to it, then store it somewhere safe.

Once you get into this volume of data, the most affordable backup system is duplication or even triplication.

I know what you are saying about your marine photographer friend. If i was in that situation i would be investing in several forms of backup including medical grade DVD-Rs (rated for long term archival) and locked storage in a bank or lawyers office

[Skinleech]

Originally Posted by machinist

Love this, been waiting for this for my media centre PC

That's my plan too. Even if i don't got for a 1tb (which would be nice, but probably too overpriced) a couple of nice 750gb drives would go down well...

[YOYOtech - Nav]

Good to see single hard drive capacity touching the 1TB mark. Overall it would be good for everybody because this step from Hitachi hopefully would encourage other big guys like seagate etc to respond due to which we should see some similar offerings pretty soon and because of this prices on these hard drives should become even more competitive. Kudos to Guys At HGST.

[MiLaMber]

Personally I'm curious as to the speed of this device.
The new perpendicular tech has the benefit of greater speed according to Hitachi.
If this device can outperform a WD Raptor...then I can see it going into many pc's, rather than used for nas, although nas will occur as well.

Good times ahead