Its fun to think that ten years ago the biggest hard drive available was 73 gigabytes. However with the constant and near unstoppable push to solid state drives, hard disk manufacturers must continue to press on. Fast forward to today and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies becomes just the first vendor to announce a 2TB 7,200RPM desktop hard drive.Hitachi is not the first hard drive manufacturer to reach 2TB, Western Digital did that earlier this year, but the first 2TB drives were limited to a read/write of 5,400RPM. Seagate hit 5,900 RPM earlier this year as well, but again these new drives will have a distinct speed advantage. These early speed disadvantages slowed sales for businesses and professionals, who need to move large amounts of data, and quickly. The new drives are 3Gbit/s SATA II with a 32MB cache, and feature five hard disk magnetic platters.
While this upgrade comes on the desktop front, Hitachi has said that they are working to make laptop hard drives larger as well, which are traditionally much smaller than their desktop counterparts. One would have to assume that advancements on 2.5'' laptop hard disk platters would be directly because of growing SSD market share. And while Hitachi has pledged to create several new technologies to condense large density platters, a 2TB laptop drive is not likely coming anytime soon.
The new desktop drives will be launching this Friday and will be list priced at $329.00 US. For more information on Hitachi Global Storage Technologies check out http://www.hitachi.com
Are you kidding me? I have 2 drives inside my laptop. A 320GB and a 500GB. I need more space too.
BTW, They need to continue to work on write speeds for SSD. At least the one I benchmarked was very fast on reads but horrible on writes. That isn't going to reflect on the market but I am going to hold off for a bit. Oh and they need to be bigger too.
It's not just laptops that use 2.5" drives. I have an EEE-Box B202 (http://techreport.com/articles.x/15234) that uses the same drive form factor; I replaced its puny 80GB drive for a 500GB one, and I'm using it as my domain server, backups, media hosting, etc. It's on 24/7 and uses very little power (less than 30 watts)...it doesn't make much sense to me to use a beefier machine for these purposes, and I need more than just a NAS. As for using an external drive, well, that would be one more drive spinning 24/7 (while the machine already needs one, one way or another). So to me this works out just fine. There's definitely room for large 2.5" drives.
I assume a lot more DVR will use 2.5" in the future for smaller form factors.
Um we have reached 1TB 2.5" drives....
Good point.
I've heard that when we reached 1TB.
I've heard that when we reached 500GB.
I've heard that when we reached 1GB.
I've heard that when we reached 500MB.
Or are you saying you don't do backups?
As we acquire more and more data, consumers are going to lose more and more. Neowin probably wont be as affected as the general population, but I bet a fair number of community members fail to backup.
As we acquire more and more data, consumers are going to lose more and more. Neowin probably wont be as affected as the general population, but I bet a fair number of community members fail to backup.
Well...since price/GB goes down every year, people have less reasons to do backups over time. I have little sympathy for those who don't do backups.
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