From technology to politics to video games; these are the random thoughts of a geek with too much time on his hands

Admit it, you're a digital pack rat.  You have backup CDs and DVDs strewn about, several external hard drives of varying age and size, and probably a flash thumb drive or three when you need to move files around.  You never seem to have enough space for your entire collection of rare South American butterfly photos and videos.  You've considered those external storage boxes that you slap a few off-the-shelf hard drives into.  But those can be costly before you even buy the first drive.  Not to mention you can't run applications or games off of them because USB 2.0 or Gigabit Ethernet just isn't quite the same as SATA II's 3GB/sec transfer rate.

So you're not sure what to do.  Will you have to abandon your life-long dream to download every episode of Welcome Back Kotter, in every language it was ever broadcast in?  Will you have to start deleting your vacation photos from 1994 when you went to visit the world's largest cheese wheel?  These are tough decisions no technophile should ever have to make.  You deserve more storage space... nay... it is your RIGHT to more storage space!  You should have the ability to store multiple copies of the contents of the Library of Congress on your PC!  Don't stand for hard drive manufacturers forcing you to use 160, 200 or even 500 gigabyte hard drives.  It's time you demanded more!

Well, you're in luck.  Hitachi has finally reached "critical mass" in it's efforts to manufacture and distribute a 1 terabyte drive (well, technically it's 1000 gigabytes, which is 0.976563 terabytes, but those whacky hard drive manufacturers have their own measuring stick).  The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 is a 7200rpm SATA II drive, and looks to clock in at around $400.  So if you have the cash to lay down, and are worrying about where that next batch of Wombats Gone Wild videos will be stored, start scouring your favorite PC parts stores and sits to see if you can get your hands on them.  As of right now, they're still relatively scarce, with major sites like Newegg.com not yet carrying them.


Comments (Page 2)
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on Apr 27, 2007
a couple of 500GB in RAID-0 can be considered a bad idea unless you have another to be used as fault tolerance. Not only do you increase the failure rate of the drives used in a RAID setup but you also consume more energy by going that route.

However, it was never mentioned anywhere to suggest to go with a RAID-0 setup. So yes, generally speaking, a couple of 500GB drives as individual drives is definitely cheaper. But still consumes more energy since you need to power two drives instead of one.

1TB is beyond what I need... at this time. I think it's safe to say that if you got a lot of stuff and you need room, it's time to back up some old files onto a DVD and be done with it. Lately I have been lazy in dumping many of my stuff onto DVD and I have been meaning to transfer some old files from CD to DVD as well.
on Apr 27, 2007
Wonder what (time wise) it'd be like to DEFRAG that baby??? Guess you just leave your system on all the time!!      
on Apr 27, 2007

Wonder what (time wise) it'd be like to DEFRAG that baby??? Guess you just leave your system on all the time!!

On a similar note...the longest scandisk time I ever had was 26 hours....and it hadn't completed....so I gave up.

Size of drive?.......

 

.....20 meg.

on Apr 29, 2007
LOL..Great question George Rogers Jr.
on Apr 29, 2007

I use Hitachi drives (mainly). I have XP on a 320Gb, Vista on a 320Gb and backups on 500Gb. All are suprisingly quiet. Also have Maxtor 300Gb and 250Gb both of which are more noisy.

If you are wondering how to defrag all that space, try mst Defrag. It runs in the background (XP only) and constantly keeps your HDs defragged. I very rarely notice it running.

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