"The 1TB drive comes in two flavors; business and pleasure — identical cousins, yet different as night and day."

Subtle. A little Patty Duke reference for those of us who watched too much TV in our younger days. Funny.

"Indeed, if Seagate's new ES.2 disk drive for enterprise were to be played by popular 1960s sitcom actor Patty Duke, one would notice it adores a minuet, The Ballet Russes, and crepe suzette. Meanwhile the 7200.11 for PCs would apt to love to rock and roll. A hot dog makes it lose control."

Not so subtle. Now you're beating the reader over the head with the joke. Not funny.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Time Warner's newest DVRs support an eSATA drive. I can get an enclosure from Fry's for about $30. With a 1TB drive, I may never delete a show again. OTOH it will be hell to find what I'm looking for. But I can go on vacation for two weeks and know I won't run out of space.

1TB NAS devices are now selling for around $600 for a two 500 GB drive configuration.

Considering 500gb for around £65-95, and 1tb for around £230. Even with the improved speeds, less energy, less space, less sata connections being used up... £40-100 is quite a bit to make up for.

Also it would be worth while waiting for the rest of the companies to come in so the real price war starts.

But yes, these drives are currently at the bleeding edge of your wallet technology. However, it should push the prices of smaller drives down, and it may well offer improved performance if the tradition of larger drives perform better due to there higher data density holds in this case.

As a side note, I have in the last year filled up my 250Gb external, 120 Gb internal and have almost filled a 200Gb internal drive. As my desire for space continues I would expect to have one of these tastey drives lurking in some sorta online storage in my house by the begining of next year (as the prices and supply sort them selfs out).

Of course, as I store more and more data the thought of losing it gets me more and more concered. Thus where I hobble togeather some sorta home storage system at the moment, I will be looking for a raid enclouse when I move to TB, as it would sux big time to lose that much data, or for me to keep track of diffrent versions of the data accross several drives.

So now a WOW thing, that would of needed to be a 500Gb flash drive. Maybe nextime :)

-cen

...shit expands to fill the space provided.

Still, at least I'll have space for all my MP3s and porn now...

of course - as soon as you buy one 1TB disk, you'll have to buy another one to back up the first!

they should sell them in pairs, ideally BOGOF (this means something in ASDA-land)

IIRC Google's hard disk analysis showed no difference between "desktop" and "enterprise" disks when it came to MTBF.

It amused me when looking at MTBF's of various components for a project - hard disks had an MTBF about twenty times higher than motherboards or any PCI card - which is definitely not my experience and I've seen systems with hundreds of computers so I have a reasonable idea.

Back in the 90's when I had my £400 40meg early IDE hard drive, I don't think anyone back then could have ever imagined 1TB in a single 3.5" drive as ever being possible.

What's next..... "I can't imagine there ever being a quadrillion byte hard drive" ......... roll on 2010 :)

I bet the RIAA and the MPAA are absolutly crapping themselves. Just think how many mp3's and pirate movies you can fit on a 1TB drive :)

Althougth this is good news for all, i already have 2.2TB of internal data storage which i can again double up which makes me happy. but....

I have never enough storage! blue ray and HD dvd's will see to that!

plus you can already fry an egg on my box it gets that hot!

That's about 500,000 music tracks, if you don't mind them fairly well compressed.

It would take you about four years to listen to all of those back to back.

"The 1TB drive comes in two flavors; business and pleasure — identical cousins, yet different as night and day."

Is it possible to summarise, for us less culturally aware readers, what WTF is the difference between the two drives, apart from the MTBF?

1tb is all well and good but as some ones suggested, you'll need another just to mirror the dam thing.

Much to my girlfriends annoyance i want to back up every single one of my DVD's as ISO images on a NAS unit and stick it in the attic out of sight. I've reckoned and i'll need 4tb in which to do this. So ideally thats 8 x 1tb drives in which to keep the thing ticking over nicely.

I'm not really clued up with the technology of hdd's, surely more drive space on a platter that doesn't increase in size means clusters squeezed closer together thus more chance of data loss? On a drive of this size its a hell of a lot of potential porn to loose.

1TB = 1024GB we all already know that.

So I think it should be called a 1000GB HDD. In the earlier days when HDDs were smaller we were loosing out on much less so, but now we are loosing out an extra 24GB on top of all the previous 'marketing storage scales'

I'll wait until I can get a TeraByte of Flash storage I think...

Lost too many HDs over the years...

P.S.

I'm surprised The Register found out the MTBF on the domestic version. Usually Seagate don't tell us poor IT souls looking for a bargain. :-)

Easing the confusion...

1KB=1000 bytes

1MB=1000.000 bytes

1GB=1000.000.000 bytes

1KiB=1024 bytes

1MiB=1048576 bytes

1GiB=1073741824 bytes

Surely 1 MiB = 1 Men in Black, doesn't it?!? I'm so confused

So it's really not that big, if I wanted to cache a years worth of UseNet binaries inc. a mirror I'd still need 2920 of them, about 12 racks worth.

Contrary to popular belief, neither the ISO nor the Standards Institute have a monopoly on the Greek language. This insistence that these prefixes cannot represent anything other than the ISO / SI definitions merely illustrates a lack of imagination. Nobody has any trouble differentiating between homonyms in English: the context alone is enough information.

(Besides, only "Kilo" means "1000" and it is the *only* such prefix to derive from a specific measurement. Mega merely meant "very large" while Giga comes from the Greek 'gigas', meaning "giant".)

At present, the de-facto "standard" for a byte is eight -- count 'em -- bits, not ten. Thus 1 "metric" KB = 8000 bits. This is about as much use to an engineer as a chocolate frying pan.

As for end users getting confused: that's rubbish too. Laypeople only care whether Product X is "bigger" than Product Y. They don't care *how much* bigger it is, only that it is. That "bigness" could be measured in Yogi Bears for all they care.

Only engineers need the precision. Engineers already know how the prefixes work. The ISO / SI "solution" serves no purpose. Kibibytes are a cat food as far as I'm concerned.

Harrumph!