PC users will be hungry for terabyte drives soon enough

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Tuesday, 09 January 2007

The latest 1 terabyte (TB) hard drives from Hitachi and Seagate are only months away from being the standard configuration for top of the line systems, with the desire to get a terabyte of storage on your system alone to trickle down through the product lines relatively quickly thereafter.

Of course, while terabyte drives remain expensive, they’ll only be purchased by those that can afford them. But just as we see the price of flat screen HDTV’s steadily fall in price, the same will happen for terabyte hard drives.

After all, do you remember the 1 gigabyte hard drive, after we left the world of megabyte hard drives? Now that the terabyte drive is here in one single unit, as opposed to two 500Gb hard drives packaged together, and with storage manufacturers already boasting of much larger sizes to come, we won’t be staying at the one terabyte size for very long.

That said, according to a report from Digitimes, thinks that PC users won't be hungry for terabyte hard drives very soon. They quote iSuppli as saying that the current sweet spot for hard drives is between 100 and 160Gb, and they claim that 1TB drives will only achieve a “3-5% penetration rate in the desktop PC market over the next 5-7 years”. There are other stats to back this up.

But that ignores the ever growing trend towards storage sucking high definition content that is already available to download over the Internet to your hard drive, and the volume of HD content that is on the way, in movies, TV shows and games.

Given that hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested into making 1TB hard drives seem small, the rush towards ever larger hard drives won’t be slowing anytime soon. While there initially won’t be a massive rush towards them, there’s no question that PC users will be hungry for terabyte drives soon enough.
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