Seagate, Hitachi both confirm 1 Terabyte Harddrives
01.06.07 - 12:38am
I originally spotted this news over at XtremeSystems where people were mentioning that 1 Terabyte drives were about to hit the market. Honestly this was no surprise considering how we have had 750GB drives for a few months now, 1TB was just the next notch in the belt. But before you go off and cast this news aside, note that there is a huge difference between the Hitachi and Seagate drives.
In the hard drive world, you have thin platters or discs of metal spinning at high speeds that store your data. The more of these platters, the more heads are required to write and read, and more heads means more heat. Add to this that the more heads you have, the greater your chances of failure, and you begin to notice why we don’t have 10 platter harddrives with 2 Terabytes of space. This is the big difference between the Hitachi and Seagate drives, the Seagate will use 4 250GB platters while they Hitachi will use 5 200GB platters. Technically Seagate’s drive is superior to the Hitachi however technicalities rarely matter in the hardware world. The Hitachi drive will have a confirmed 32MB of onboard cache which may help with buffering but I don’t understand why we aren’t seeing a larger 1GB or larger flash based cache. Vista will be able to incorporate hybrid disk/Flash drives and this would be an excellent feature to help make one drive stand out from the other.
Just judging from the preliminary data I would wager that the Seagate drive will be quieter, cooler, and last longer but that is just a rough guess from the data available. Within the next few months we should see these drives hit the market and then they will be put to the test. Now I am waiting for a cheap 16GB flash drive to hit the market, I would love to see the performance numbers out of one of those babies.
Relevant Links
Hitachi Source
Seagate Source
Speak Your Mind