The first hard drive with a capacity of 1TB is about to hit the shelves. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) is aiming its Deskstar 7K1000 at consumers, but also has a 1TB CinemaStar model for set-top box manufacturers - especially for boxes that record HD.
Hitachi says the Deskstar will debut at around the $399 mark in the US. It's available with both SATA (3.0Gb/s) and ATA interfaces.
"The industry's first one-terabyte hard drive represents a milestone that is 50 years in the making, and it reasserts the hard drive's leadership as the highest-capacity, lowest-cost storage technology," said Head of Marketing Shinjiro Iwata.
Hitachi has also released software designed to best manage hard drives used in set-top box situations - especially when constant access is required for applications such as IPTV or HD streaming. Called AVSM, or Audio-Visual Storage Manager, Hitachi's aim is to increase duty cycles by up to 50 percent.
Hitachi hard drive facts and figures:
- In 1956, the RAMAC, the first hard drive stored 5MB of data. That's almost equivalent to one 4-minute MP3 song.
- That same year, the RAMAC cost $50,000 or $10,000 per megabyte.
- Hitach's one terabyte hard drive, a gigabyte of storage costs less than 20p.
- It took the industry 35 years to reach 1GB (1991), another 14 years to reach 500GB (2005) and just two years to reach 1TB (2007)
- It took the industry 50 years to ship almost 3 billion hard drives; some analysts predict we will ship another 3 billion in just 5 years.
