What are 1 (one) Terabyte Hard Drives?

One terabyte hard drives have recently hit the market – this means you can store 1,000 gigabytes of information on one hard disk. When the first hard drives were manufactured no one thought you’d need more than a megabyte – then a gigabyte – then a terabyte. Well here it is folks. Hitachi released theirs this month, a one terabyte massive hard-disk that can hold 150 high-definition movies! Imagine all the music storage that is, at around 5 megabytes a song, and there being 1,000,000 megabytes! The Hitachi model is a Deskstar 7K100 and is the first hard drive to reach one terabyte officially. The cost is around 390-450 dollars USD so far, and puts the price at a very reasonable rate per gig, however it is expensive. As prices on the TB drive fall – across the board cuts will take place on per gig price, meaning the older non TB drives will be most likely cheaper.

In performance it is said to be one of the top notch drives available. It fits in a normal 3.5 port, and is virtually identical to other hard drives in outward appearance but inside it has 250 gigabytes on its 5 platters. It is also the first 3.5 hard drive to use perpendicular magnetic recording, an alternate method to the traditional means. Here are it’s specs (From the manufacturer’s website). Speed: 7,200 RPM, Interfaces: SATA 3.0 GB/s, Seek Time 8.5 ms read and 9.2 ms Write Time; with this comes the largest hard drive to date manufactured and released to the public.

The era of the Terabyte has begun, now the new standard of computer measurement won’t be in gigabytes of hard disk space – but in Terabytes. Just as a reference TB is the shorthand for Terabyte.