As if all those gigabytes aren’t enough, Dell decided to break the ice with a Hitachi One (1) Terabyte harddrive with an Area 51 game-oriented machine from its Alienware subsidiary. Getting the 1 terabyte option costs $500.
To help you get a hold of the numbers, 1 gigabyte is 1 billion bytes and 1 terabyte is 1 trillion bytes. In case you’re wondering, as printed text a terabyte would occupy 100 million reams of paper, consuming some 50,000 trees. It is enough to hold 16 days (not hours) of DVD-quality video, or a million pictures, or almost two years worth of continuous music.
Henry Baltazar, storage analyst for The 451 Group, a technology analyst firm in San Francisco said, “There will be a demand for it, since a lot of people have digital media, like movies, pictures and music.”
“Larger devices will become more commonplace, and we will see the same kind of transition from gigabyte to terabyte drives as we previously saw from megabyte to gigabyte drives – in fact, the move from 500 gigabytes to a terabyte has taken longer than expected.”
This latest advance in technology required a breakthrough in “areal density” which is basically how tight the bytes are packed on the surface of the disk, according to Doug Pickford, a marketing executive at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. The trick, he explained, was to move to Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), where each bit is a perpendicular rather than a linear magnetized spot on the disk – as if the bits were standing up rather than lying down.
Pickford said that currently, areal density is growing at about 35 to 40 percent per year, and the techniques used to create the 1T drive are expandable to make a 5T drive. More work will be needed to surpass the 5T hurdle, but he foresaw no physical limitations until drives reach a capacity of at least 50T.
And in case you’re wondering, 50 Terabytes is enough to hold about a century of music.
Check out this cool Alienware Area 51 and see the specs for yourself.
Now, what to do with all those space?
