Terabyte Dells
Dell is going to start shipping consumer PCs with terabyte hard disk drives.
Dell vice president, Neil Hand said: "This type of capability used to be available only to the largest corporations. With the spectacular advancement in hard drives and the engineering in our systems, we're now able to bring it to consumers."
The first Dell PCs to use the drives will be its own Alienware-branded gaming PCs. XPS systems will then follow suit. A check on the US Alienware site shows four 1TB drives can be shipped. The drives are not mentioned on the UK site yet.
Dell will use Hitachi GST's 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 drive spinning at 7,200rpm with a 3GBit/s serial ATA interface. The drive uses perpendicular recording, has five platters, a read access time of 8.5msecs and a write time of 9.2msecs. It has a cache of 32MB and an 8.7ms average seek time.
If I add up all the disk drives I have in various computers I can't reach a terabyte. Egads. I remember when a 20 gigabyte drive was considered enormous. It wasn't all that long ago, either. HAL 9000 is just on the horizon. I'm sorry, Dave.
Geek Stuff | Gaius Saturday, 17 March , 2007
By John F. Opie, Saturday, 17 March , 2007 @ 2:38 pm
Hi -
I’ve had a terabyte at home for 6 months now: 2x 300 GB and 1x 400 GB externals, adding to the 600GB I’ve had internally for 2 years now. The externals all run off of USB and serve as backups and as data repositoris.
But 1 TB on a spindle is just awesome: in 2 years they’ll be inexpensive commidity items. That’s progress for ya…
Long time lurker, great blog!
By Gaius, Saturday, 17 March , 2007 @ 2:54 pm
Thanks for the kind words. Yeah, I expect that TB storage will become cheap really quickly. It will also become necessary with the enormous programs that are being generated these days. (It used to be a point of pride to write really compact code. Not so much these days.)
By skh.pcola, Saturday, 17 March , 2007 @ 3:47 pm
I remember when 600 *MEG* drives were multi-thousand dollar items. That was when I had a 20 meg HD in my XT and thought I was stylin’. Heh. Progress, gotta love it.
By Gaius, Saturday, 17 March , 2007 @ 4:26 pm
I remember working in DOS 1.1. On an original IBM PC. We worked off floppy disks!