Although there are various storage devices that can hold up to one terabyte of data, we've yet to see them be packaged in the same way as a normal, lightweight hard drive that can be easily installed onto Joe Schmo's computer. However, Hitachi is now saying that this kind of hard drive could be coming soon...by the end of the year, in fact.

Hitachi says they want it to be a product that people will be able to use for personal and home networking needs. May I just say, out of redundancy, that that is a lot of space. It's a thousand gigabytes (though I prefer to see it as a million megabytes).
As QJ quantifies, "That's the whole run of Survivor (from the days when Richard Hatch was naked to the present) coupled with every episode of Beverly Hills 90210 and Baywatch ever made on your desktop right there." I rather like Cnet's depiction: "It sounds cool--sort of like you could be running a ballistic missile tracking site in your den."

Either way, with that much space, it'd be a monster hard drive. By the way, that's a pun for all you Greek majors out there ("tera" is Greek for "monster"). What's also cool is that this year marks the 50th anniversary of the very first hard drive. It was 5 megabytes. That means we've been increasing hard drive capacity by nearly 20,000 MB per year. If we keep going at that rate, by the year 52000, we'll be talking about petabyte hard drive (yeah, baby! A billion megabytes!)

More at Cnet. Via QJ

Report Published by: Mark Raby