Hitachi 1TB drive brings back the memories

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 06 January 2007 12:52

Opinion and Analysis

Now Seagate will bring us a 1TB hard drive with 4 platters holding 250Gb each, and Hitachi bringing one with 5 platters holding 200Gb each. Either way, you’re going to have access to 1TB in a single drive, and if you have two, that’s 2TB. Building your own home storage network, while initially expensive, will become ever more common.

Already today, tech savvy people are building digitally connected homes piece by piece across the world. I’d wager many of you reading this article have hundreds of gigabtyes of storage space at your disposal, if not already in the terabyte club.

Dreaming about getting to 1Gb was one thing, but once we passed it, it was only a question of time before 1TB would be breached. Now the question for the hard disk industry is how quickly then can increase the size.

Seagate could conceivably create a hard drive with 5 250Gb platters and launch a 1.25TB model, and package two of them together to offer a 2.5TB package.

Whatever ends up actually happening we’re all yet to see. But it was only 51 years ago that television launched, and it’s taken us 50 years to get to a 1TB hard drive. In 2004, Samsung launched a standard definition rear-projection flat screen TV with a 40Gb hard drive built-in.

Then late last year LG launched a plasma and LCD HDTV with 250Gb hard drive within – capable of recording in HD, too! The screens were only 720p, with 1080p due in February 2007, and had no Blu-ray or HD DVD recorder within to transfer recordings across, something also promised for future models.

But it’s a long way from wanting a 1Gb drive as a teen. Now that LG have launched the combo Blu-ray/HD DVD player, it’s easy to foresee that every high end HDTV we buy will come standard with at least a 1TB hard drive within, full wireless capabilities using 802.11n or better, Gigabit Ethernet port, an inbuilt BitTorrent client, compatibility with the Mac iTV and Windows Media Center extenders, the option of having a x86 based computer inside running Vista or another operating system, a Blu-ray/HD DVD recorder to make backups on universal removable media and a raft of inputs from multiple HDMI sockets to all our analogue favourites from composite upwards throughout the years.

It’s more than technically possible today, it’s already being done at lower specifications to different degrees today. We could see a display model with most of the features above from Sony, LG, Samsung, Panasonic and other companies by CES 2008, if only they wanted to make one!

Sony’s model could even have a PS3 built-in…

Well… I’ve speculated long and far enough. Hurrah to Hitachi and Seagate for bringing the  1TB hard drive to market within the next 3 to 6 months. As I’ve said before, our quest for more space is never ending, for space is the final frontier, after all… isn’t it? :-)