The future rulers of the earth: Hard Disk Robot

The sci-fi quacks you always see forecasting the apocalypse and computer-run future worlds have it mostly right. We are going to be brutally exterminated by our own creations comprised of silicon and rare metals. However, what they don’t realize is it will be at the helm of legions of decrepit, angry, and neglected platter-based hard drives. Take a gander folks, the Hard Disk Robot will come to format us one last time…

Western Digital to announce 3TB hard drives in 2010?

The current crop of hard drives max out at 2 TB. If you think this is merely adequate you’re no doubt looking forward to when 10TB flash drives are $5 at the dollar store. As cool as it is to dream, we still have several years before storage becomes that cheap or dense. Since I can’t give you news of a 10 exabyte drive, I’ll patch over the wound with a 3TB drive. Is it here? Not quite. But it’s coming. WD was the first to break out with the 2TB hard disk which was a feat of size and storage technologies. As is usual in the technology world, if you’re sitting still you’re moving backwards.

According to Dr Geoff Barrall, founder and CEO of Drobo, WD will release 3TB hard drives in 2010. If there’s 3TB single drives that means we’ll get 6TB dual drive variants. *smiles* The evidence behind his claims come from the fact that Drobo will be offering a 3TB drive next year — Drobo gets their drives from WD. You put the pieces together. The densities required to hit a 3TB drive (roughly 500Gbit/sq in….and 750GB/platter) are certainly achievable in the near term. Can manufactures do it? I know it’s not an exabyte, but will it suffice?

Ubergizmo > The Register

320GB now comes in 1.8″ form. Thank you Toshiba

Small devices need small parts (Capt. Obvious here). Many devices that require some form of digital storage have long moved on from small hard drives and embraced flash storage since prices have fallen dramatically and continue to do so. For some applications however, a traditional spinner may be worthwhile. Say you need more storage than is physically or monetarily possible. That’s precisely where the ‘ol spinners still reign supreme. Toshiba today announced a new high capacity 320GB 1.8″ hard drive making it the worlds smallest flash drive to claim such a capacity. This minuscule wasteland for digital bits revolves at a faster than average (for the size) 5400 RPM’s and is capable of holding ~ 160,000 of MP3′s or 282 hours of DVD quality video. Not too shabby!

Some media players and ultra-portable devices will surely benefit from this extra breathing room allowing users to store even more while on the go. We all know that at some point hard drives such as these will fade away as non-movable flash storage takes over. For now, the spinners still have some fight left in them. So which would you take: the better battery life associated with non-movable storage or the faster speeds and higher capacities/lower costs of traditional drives?

Pocket-Lint

Seagate to be first to market with 2.5″ 1TB portable hard drives?

Hey you. The one that takes 3-400 pictures of every family event, sunrise, and other not so important occurrence on planet earth. I know you’re probably running out of hard drive space or already on your 2nd or 3rd. Instead of actually deleting the bad, redundant, or downright useless pictures, Seagate will soon feed your addiction. Already stealing the thunder from Toshiba’s 640GB 2.5″ hard drive announcement” Mobile techies and digital media lovers who need the top-of-the-line when it comes to mobile data storage and capacity will soon have a new friend in seagate. According to several British retailers of whom have already started listing pages for new drives, Seagate will be announcing and soon releasing the worlds’ first 2.5″ 1TB hard drives.

Now, before you get to excited you should know they’re 5400 RPM hard drives with a rather meager 8 MB cache meaning they aren’t going to be the quickest drives when burdened with the task of filling 1TB’s worth of space with countless 1′s and 0′s. Also unknown at this time is the drives height. Some may see this as unimportant. However, if you plan on using these drives in laptops, drive height is a big unanswered question. If it’s a 9.5mm or smaller design, laptop hard drive space can finally claim to have reached the herald 1TB mark. However, any bigger than 9.5mm and these new boundary busting drives will be relegated to external hard drive cases. Hey, I’m not complaining either way. Though a 1 TB single drive laptop sounds wicked doesn’t it?

Source: Notebook Review, Fudzilla