1st TB hard drives to arrive

[Demon Cleaner]

Hitachi has now released a 1TB SATAII 32MB cache HDD.

Hitachi 7K1000 drive

HD charts here

[Harrison]

Very nice. That would explain why the 500GB and 750GB drives have recently dropped in price.

They mention that Seagate are also readying one for release soon, so I'm going to wait until that is on the market before even considering such a purchase. A 1TB drive is extremely tempting though, but it will depend on the price which I expect to be high to begin with and then drop off in a couple of months.

[Demon Cleaner]

A 1TB HDD is too risky, if that one fails, you're really screwed. I'd prefer to buy 4*300GB or even 6*200 disks and configure them into a Raid 5, getting also almost 1TB. Only disadvantage is the place where to put the disks.

[Harrison]

Plus the power consumption, heat generated and noise of a lot of drives in a cluster.

I agree that a single 1TB HD is very risky if it did suddenly die. But that is only if you are using it to store the only copy of data. I personally have everything backed up to DVD-R as well as on the HD so it is not such an issue if the drive did fail, all be it a big job to copy all of the files back onto a replacement drive.

Of course the solution to that problem is to buy two 1TB drives and set them up as a mirrored RAID array. Not quite a robust or secure as a RAID5 array, but cheaper than having to buy 3x 1TB drives. Although think of the space you would have with such a RAID5 setup.

[Demon Cleaner]

I personally have everything backed up to DVD-R as well as on the HD so it is not such an issue if the drive did fail, all be it a big job to copy all of the files back onto a replacement drive.

That's probably a good idea, but always backing up to DVDs takes a lot of time. And putting it back even more. I'll stick with external drives for backups.

[TiredOfLife]

I backup from one hd to another but as they are in the same tower, I backup to dvd as well.