This is INSANE !
Who will ever need so much storage?????

I'll take 3 of those in Raid 5 configuration, please.... Where do I sign?

I want a chest-mounted one too!

These sound great, but I'm always skeptical about having all of my data on one drive. I guess I could just buy 2 and run them in RAID 1. Assuming you've got RAID 1 built into your mobo, $800 for ~1TB of mirrored storage isn't bad.

Um...wow. I want 9 of them. Wait? What am I going to do with 9 of them? Who cares. I want 9 of them.

And aec007, why only 3 drives? In a RAID 5 you're going to lose a full third of your space to parity. Most NAS/SAN boxes come with at least 4 slots now as well. Might as well up it another drive and go crazy. Hmm. But you might need two volumes? What are the volume limits now? I remember bumping up against the 2TB limit a few years ago. Have they fixed that? Anyway, I want 9 of them.

Working in a retail repair shop, I see more and more people wanting to bring in their failing hard drives for data backup. These newer monster sized hard drives are making my job harder and taking longer to archive onto DVD media. Seems no matter how badly these drives are made, no one takes the time to backup their data even though anything with that many platters spinning that fast is bound to fail just as fast.

Wow...when I added my first HD to my PC in 1985, it had a whopping...um...uh...

I can't do it. It's too trite. Do they have that "Moore's Law" comparison on a macro yet?

@ scorpicon: and the more drives you add will lower your $/TB cost. Providing you go to a SAN/NAS box type setup. Imagine 4 drives in a RAID 5. 3TB of parity protected goodness for $1600. That's a 3x storage boost over your mirror for only 2x the cost. ($533/TB) Yowza. I want 9 of them.

More space than most people will ever need, but still very tempting for the price.

Uh, 1 TB (terabyte) is 1000 GB. Unless you mean the drive will give you 931.5GiB of space?

I'll take 4.

I'll take four too. If only I could afford one...

6 uncompressed HD videos can consume 3+TB of storage. People who dabble in video often, particularly HD will probably snap their trendy fingers in glee over this doodad.

For all you porno fans with a hankering for high-def naughty stuff in a vast storage wonderland, this Bud's for you.

@Worf:
931.5 would be the formatted capacity of the disk, yes.

Personally I don't see the value. 1TB for $400? I could go to Geeks.com and get two Seagate 500GB drives for $340. Hell, I can buy three 400GB drives from Frys for $300 and make myself a 1.2TB RAID.

So basically you'd just be paying more for the convenience of having it in one drive? Thanks, but I'd rather have redundancy.

I have an array of 750s, but currently only 2, in an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. I am happy to know that I have redundant storage now, and that I can expand to 2.25TB with redundancy over the 3TB logical array. As such, if you build with the biggest drive you can, you'll have more capacity/space in the future. I could've easily bought way more space with smaller drives, but then I wouldn't have room to increase.

It didn't beat the raptor on any test:
"The overall performance of this drive has been phenomenal and is close enough to the WD1500ADFD Raptor drive that we consider it a worthy adversary".
Close one the transfer, but the access time is way higher.

...and I still remember how friggin excited I was when I shelled out $750 for the first Western Digital 1 gig IDE drive. Give it 6 months. Everyone'll have one out and they'l be $200.

@ninjasmurf

3 drives minimum for Raid 5.
4 would be ideal... but I'm not made out of money!!! ($1200 is tough to swallow)
The nice thing is that you can always go larger... :)

... And the limit on storage capacity with the new 48LBA addressing on ATA-3 spec. is 144 Petabytes. WOOO HOOO!!!!
Check out http://www.48bitlba.com/ for more info.

@ scorpicon "These sound great, but I'm always skeptical about having all of my data on one drive."

But, file sizes are getting larger. Having 100 10mb files on my old 1gb drive, is the same as having 100 10gb files on this thing. That's easy to do if you're editing video.

Ok, so... its sitting in my AppleTV enclosure, and for some reason I can't connect it, and the case won't close. I'm very disturbed and unhappy. :-( :-)

@chiper
It really depends on how much capacity you want. You're forgetting that it takes up slots!

So, if a computer (sans HDD) is $1000 and has 3 HDD slots. 3TB system would be $2200. With 500GB, You'll need 2 PCs and 6 disks for $2000+$680=$2680. If you sling it off external USB2/firewire, then your USB port will be a thruput bottleneck. eSata enclosures are nearly same price as a PC. So, it really depends on what you need.

Also, this is good because each gen of higher capacity lowers the price of the previous gen. I think a good part of the reason why the 750 GB prices fell so quickly in the past 6 months was because of the 1TB drive announcement 6 months ago

Still doing just fine with a 30Gb Raptor, thanks.

From a more standardized correct way (relating to binary numbers):
8 bits = 1 byte
1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte (due to 2^10 = 1024)
1024 x 1024 bytes = 1 megabyte = 2^20 bytes
1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1 gigabyte = 2^30 bytes
1024 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1 terabyte = 2^40 bytes

Most HD boxes state 1 gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 bytes. Using the more standardized method above (which windows actually reports as the "formatted" size of the drive) gives 1,073,741,824 bytes. That's mostly the reason 1 terabyte "formats" to 931.3 gigabytes (1x10^12 bytes = 931.3 GiB).

The reason behind all this is obvious --- the company wants the highest number actually displayed for the storage size of their drive on the box. Microsoft really had no reason to display this more misleading number though so stuck to the more correct/standarized method.

@auroragh
I never consider physical space in this sort of thing, I usually build my own cases (which is why I found your $1000 PC price point quite shocking), but I see your point.
Obviously if you've only got space for a few drives, this is ideal for you.

@worf

thanks for your infinite wisdom...

That would be great in the new mac's

@suijin:

Actually, "kilo" is 1000. "kibi" is 1024, ditto on mega/micro/nano/giga/tera all the way up.

Sure it initially started as a deceptive way, but it's also the most correct way. After all, a kilometer is 1000 meters, not 1024 meters, a kilogram is 1000 grams, and not 1024 grams (fat people rejoice - measure weight in kibigrams!)

And guess what, your "1.44MB" floppy is actually 1,440 kibibytes in size - talk about deception all the way back to the 80's (it's larger than 1.44MB, and smaller than 1.44MiB). Microsoft also isn't that consistent - sometimes they use KB, other times they mean KiB, and yet other times they mean KiB/MB (all within Explorer, too).

Last I checked computers were based on binary. We never used kibi, etc. abreviations in college (about 13 years ago). Maybe terminology has changed some to clarify, or maybe my professor and books were wrong.

There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.