Daily Cup of Tech

I remember the first hard drive that I owned. It has a whopping 20 MB of disk space. I recall a conversation I had with someone about a new 500 MB drive and wondering what in the world you would do with all that storage capacity. Apparently, we figured that one out!

So, I am really excited that Hitachi has created the world’s first 1 TB hard drive! The Deskstar 7K1000 will sell for about US$400 and will allow you to store up to 3,000 hours of video or about 200,000 songs in MP3 format. It will be available sometime in Q1 of this year.

According to the website, 1 TB drives are going to become a necessity as everything starts to go digital:

Consumers have entered an era where everything they capture on digital still or video, listen to and write, can be saved and shared for future enjoyment. In the connected home, storage becomes the epicenter of the home network, linking the living room, the office and the bedroom together in a truly digitally-connected home. The family’s games, home movies, photos and music can be stored and accessed from a variety of digital entertainment devices within the home. As the distribution of video content to social networking sites and to handheld devices becomes more commonplace, storage capacity requirements will reach new heights. In this scenario, consumers can begin to imagine what they would do with all that capacity. With 1TB, Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K1000, for PCs and home media centers and the CinemaStar 7K1000 for DVRs help to usher in this new era.

Here are the specs:

• 1000/750 GB – SATA (GB = 1 billion bytes, accessible capacity may be less)
• 148 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
• 1070 Mb/s max. media data rate
• 8.7 ms average seek time (with command overhead)
• 7,200 RPM, 4.17 ms average latency
• Serial-ATA 3.0Gb/s
• 32 MB data buffer – SATA
• 26.1 mm in height (max)
• 700g in weight (max)
• 5/4 platters, 10/8 recording heads – SATA
• 300 G/1 ms pulse non-operating shock
• 9.0 (5 disk)/8.1 (4 disk) watt idle power – SATA
• 2.9 Bels typical idle acoustics
• 5-60 degrees C operating temperature

I imagine that if I were to drop a couple of these drives into a FreeNAS box, it would make a pretty sweet storage unit!

P.S. If you would like to see some edutainment, check out License to Read.

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