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IMAGINE ONE THOUSAND thousand thousand thousand bytes. A terabyte, if you will. But more than just that—a milestone in storage capacity that hard drive manufacturers have been chasing for years. After more than a decade of living in a world of gigabytes, the bar has finally been raised by Hitachi's terabyte-capacity Deskstar 7K1000.

Being first to the terabyte mark gives Hitachi bragging rights, and more importantly, the ability to offer single-drive storage capacity 33% greater than that of its competitors. Hitachi isn't banking on capacity alone, though. The 7K1000 is also outfitted with a whopping 32MB of cache—double what you get with other 3.5" hard drives. Couple that extra cache with 200GB platters that have the highest areal density of any drive on the market, and the 7K1000's performance could impress as much as its capacity.

Has Hitachi achieved a perfect balance of speed and storage with its Deskstar 7K1000? We've tested it against nearly 20 competitors—including its closest 750GB rivals from Seagate and Western Digital—to find out.

Source: http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2007q3/hitachi-deskstar-7k1000/index.x?pg=1

Building on Philips long consumer electronics heritage, the revolutionary new drive features an ultra-fast eSATA interface that is six times quicker than the industry-standard USB 2.0, giving users immediate, additional capacity to store more of their music, movies and photos than ever before.

The SPD5130 hard drive has a pioneering single-disk form, allowing for significantly smaller dimensions than the double-drive solutions currently on the market. It will be available to buy in Europe and the US in the summer, priced at 449 EUR and 499 USD.

The Philips SPD5130 is designed specifically for users who require additional storage, or who want to back up all their data quickly and easily for safekeeping. Providing industry-beating storage space from a single hard disk, its unprecedented one-terabyte capacity can store 1 million photos, 250,000 songs or six weeks of uncompressed video. The SPD5130 features a groundbreaking eSATA connection in addition to a standard USB 2.0 interface, allowing files to be transferred instantly, while a 32MB buffer ensures that data is transferred reliably and free from error. Thanks to these advanced technologies, the hard drive can be used to transparently and securely extend existing storage on the computer.

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news100351474.html

Just when you got used to hard drives with hundreds of gigabytes (hundreds of billions of bytes) they do it: make one with a terabyte (a trillion bytes).

Yes, you can now get a terabyte hard drive on a desktop PC. Breaking the ice with a Hitachi drive was Dell, with “Area 51” game-oriented machines from its Alienware subsidiary. The 1T option initially costs $500.

In case you’re wondering, as printed text a terabyte would occupy 100 million reams of paper, consuming some 50,000 trees. It is enough to hold 16 days (not hours) of DVD-quality video, or a million pictures, or almost two years worth of continuous music.

Source: http://www.livescience.com/technology/070408_terabyte_anyone.html

Fujitsu has announced a breakthrough in magnetic recording. Using patterned media technology, Fujitsu was able to achieve a one-dimensional array nanohole pattern with an unprecedented 25 nanometer pitch. This dramatic new achievement was presented at the 10th Joint MMM/Intermag Conference in Baltimore, MD.

This revolutionary accomplishment came from the joint work of Yamagata Fujitsu Limited, Fujitsu Laboratories Limited and Kanagawa Academy of Science and Technology (KAST). With this latest patterned media announcement, Fujitsu has successfully realized a nanohole pattern with 25 nanometer pitch, a process which will enable one Terabit/in2 recording on HDDs in the future.

Fujitsu first announced innovations with patterned media recording in June 2005. At that time, advancements were made with the introduction of a process to pre-pit aluminum media, resulting in nanoholes with an extremely dense and ordered structure. In addition, a technique called land/groove texturing allowed for the creation of discrete tracks in which the nanoholes could be formed. This progress in patterned media has enabled the development of high capacity hard disk drives, especially in smaller form factors.
Source: http://www.physorg.com/news88358737.html

Imagine taking the entire collection of historical documents at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and storing it on a single DVD.

University of Central Florida Chemistry Professor Kevin D. Belfield and his team have cracked a puzzle that stumped scientists for more than a dozen years. They have developed a new technology that will allow users to record and store massive amounts of data -- the museum’s entire collection or as many as 500 movies, for example -- onto a single disc or, perhaps, a small cube.

Belfield’s Two-Photon 3-D Optical Data Storage system makes this possible.

Source: http://news.ucf.edu/UCFnews/index?page=article&id=0024004105bd60439010c0c76ce2f00409b