Wow, this is unreal. And it's just going to get better.
Disk drive manufacturers have announced plans to begin shipping the first half-Tbyte desktop storage devices, hoping to capitalize in the second half of 2005 on the marketplace's growing hunger for multimedia and large amounts of data.
Both Seagate Technology and Maxtor now say they will hit the half-Tbyte mark in capacity this year, with storage components aimed at the consumer and commercial segments, respectively.
Milpitas, Calif.-based Maxtor will bring the first half-Tbyte storage capacities to the desktop with a new 3.5-inch drive it says will ship in the next quarter.
The drive will run at 7,200 rpm, with a 3.0-Gbyte SATA and ATA 133, and have capacity of up to 500 Gbytes, the company said. The new Maxtor drives are in addition to the company's high-volume OneTouch and OneTouch II products—stand-alone external drives that provide as much as 300 Gbytes of backup and storage capacity.
Company executives declined to say when on Maxtor's road map the company will begin shipping a full Tbyte of storage, but the 500-Gbyte would be among the largest, if not the largest, capacity drive in the desktop space by the time it ships.
Pricing was not immediately available.
Earlier this month, Seagate, Scotts Valley, Calif., rolled out 10 new disk drives for both the retail and commercial markets, including the DB35 series, an external hard drive.
The 500-Gbyte drive is targeted at the DVR and home entertainment space. Seagate said the drive would have capacity to store 85 hours of high-definition video or 500 hours of standard video.
Pricing also was not available, and Seagate said the drive would begin shipping in the fall.
Nader Afzali, general manager of Optima Computers, a Shawnee Mission, Kan.-based system builder, said that there is a place for higher-capacity drives given the amount of data now available.
"There is a good demand for large capacity," Afzali said. "[Customers] ask for it. Managing the data has always been an issue.
People have things on their desktop they don't know how to find."
Currently, he said, the upper limits of storage in the systems his company builds range between 200 Gbytes and 300 Gbytes.
Both Seagate and Maxtor said the new drives will ship with added management functionality.
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