Terabyte hard drives gain traction

Gadget News - Wednesday December 12, 2007

Terabyte hard drives gain traction

Berlin - In some ways, it's good to be digital: the housing is getting bigger by the day, even while prices are level or even sinking.

The real estate in question, though, is hard drives, with 160 gigabyte models going for less than 50 dollars at present. And the ongoing development of hard drives with even greater capacity is depressing prices even further. Soon the market will see prices of hard disks that hold a terabyte - that's 1,000 gigabytes - begin to come down. That's a lot of storage space for films, photos, music and programs.

Hard drives with such enormous capacity can either be built into the computer or used externally via a USB cable. There is little difference in price any more between external and internal models. The bigger question is how the hard drive will be used. That's because external hard drives take longer to access than internal devices.

"External hard drives are therefore primarily useful as backups," says Peter Knaak, a computer expert at the German consumer testing organization Stiftung Warentest in Berlin.

One example of an external solution is the "Datastation duo w.u". The device, sold by Trekstor, comes with either one or two terabytes of memory - configured as either two 500 GB or two 1 TB drives. The drives cost 349 and 799 dollars respectively and will work with computers running any of the following operating systems: Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, Mac OS X or Linux Kernel 2.6 or newer.

As with the Trekstor unit, the HD-35x2PUK from Teac provides one terabyte of storage capacity, in this case connected to the computer via USB 2.0. The portable hard drive costs 259 dollars. Other external solutions offering at least a terabyte of capacity can be found from Maxtor, Iomega, Fantec and Buffalo, among others.

Internal terabyte hard drives are sold by Hitachi and Samsung. Both require a motherboard with a SATA interface, which rules out installation in older PCs. While the Hitachi model rings in at 314 dollars, the Samsung hard drive is available for 260 dollars. "The price war is just getting started for terabyte hard drives," says Boi Feddern from Hanover-based c't magazine.

Peter Knaak advises against making changes to the computer as external solutions are better. "A quick interface is important, though." For that reason, he recommends using a network storage unit that is connected to several computers via Ethernet. That provides significantly quicker access to the data than via USB 2.0.

Anyone with a reasonably modern computer should have no difficulty installing a terabyte-sized hard drive. 'Older' here means over three years old. "The operating system shouldn't be ancient either," Feddern says. Terabyte hard drives can be integrated with no problem for machines running a fully updated version of Windows 2000, Windows XP or Vista.

The investment in a large hard drive may well be worth the money for users who record HD videos. "Each film is several gigabytes," Feddern says. A more affordable alternative to a terabyte drive is two hard drives with 500 gigabytes of storage space apiece. Those can be had for roughly 100 dollars per unit right now.

The sky appears to be the limit when it comes to increasing capacity. Hitachi is current trying to shrink the distance between data tracks on hard drives to 30 nanometres or less. That would mean a capacity of four terabytes within a few years. Of course, by that point most PCs will come with hard drives of at least one terabyte pre-installed anyway.

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