Western Digital Launches World-First 2TB Hard Drive

ittech said:

regarding the large drives, since people tend not to back up their drives, that's a lot of data to lose if a drive goes south. i cater to small business more than home market, so the question is not how big a drive do you want, rather it is how much data can you afford to lose? backup strategies don't get nearly the attention they deserve.

You company or personal Data would only make up a tiny percentage compared to the actual programs installed so as long as you are backing up personal Data you can reinstall everything else.

2TB!! what would you fill it with that was not copyrighted?

damoh said:

2TB!! what would you fill it with that was not copyrighted?

Backing up your legit DVD movie collection? I have 1TB and haven't got nearly half my DVD's on there yet and need more room.

MS Operating system or backing up your 1TB disk/partition!! lol

Bellerophon said:

Obsolete or at least it will be in the next year. SSD's are already up to 1TB. Article here. Can't believe that already the prices are starting to drop for these and boy they are fast, forget about the WD VelociRaptor already comparable size and price

I want one.

Better read the fine print:

xxx said:

PureSilicon has not said how much its 1TB drive will cost, saying only that it will be available in the third quarter of this year with "pricing to be determined".

That is still a long way away, right now. Meanwhile these 2 TB WDs are 'in the wild - as in finalized, RTM and gold status.

Mr GRiM said:

That's good to see they have come along so far so quickly, i can't beleive they are at 1TB already, I want one too!! The next step will be to incorporate the system RAM into the same device and then we can say goodbye to the page file and have even lower latency.

You'll never say goodbye to the pagefile - High density RAM is still not *that* cheap, and even if it gets to a point where it is, RAM is volatile - so you'll need a nonvolatile medium to store info for things like write caching, program info that is not to be changed (read only), etc.

96accord said:

2TB........ WOW!

I am young and don't remember the small drives (under 10GB) but 2TB! Still alot of space!

I do - Hell, I love Seagate, but WD made themselves a major player in the storage medium market by buying out what, IMNSHO, was *the* best HD manufacturer ever - Conner. I swore by Conner when I used to use their 425 MB HDs, and the *only* problem I had was trying to get a double density 850 MB HD to work with a WD - they didn't exactly like each other before the buyout....it worked wonders with a 425 on the same IDE channel, but put anything else there and the 850 went stupid.

Ahhh, 425 MB....

Mr GRiM said:

I remember when my mate got his first computer, it was a Commodore Amiga 1200 and he had a 100MB hard drive which was considered pretty good back then around 1994 I think.

lol Tandy 1000 EX, 256 K RAM, dual 5.25 360K drives, ***no hard 'card'***
And had a Ti/99-4A....

ittech said:

for mr. grim, try a sinclair zx80 with no hd but a whopping 2K...yeah, 2K of ram. an add on pack of 16mb cost more than the original unit. circa about 1980/1981. ran in basic but if you learned machine code, you could do an amazing amout of work with 2K.

OK, that has me, unless I get to count my ColecoVision console?

ittech said:

regarding the large drives, since people tend not to back up their drives, that's a lot of data to lose if a drive goes south. i cater to small business more than home market, so the question is not how big a drive do you want, rather it is how much data can you afford to lose? backup strategies don't get nearly the attention they deserve.

OTOH a drive that size with W7 and VHD load technology would allow for a *nice* plethora of desktop virtualization options, both for businesses *and* homes users....

It's funny, I see people getting these super fact raptors and putting them in RAID to get every ounce of speed out of their system for whatever reason -0 I say RAID 5 your data and let the OS boot off a normal SATA drive (or SSD if you want the speed) - and save yourself the headache from, not a reinstall, but a data erased / lost / unrecoverable" scenario....

But that is just me....

Mr GRiM said:

You company or personal Data would only make up a tiny percentage compared to the actual programs installed so as long as you are backing up personal Data you can reinstall everything else.

Ummm....That is a glittering generality that you cannot afford to believe is 100% true.

ittech said:

true, but people tend in home markets anyway to use their drive to 80 or even 90 percent capacity, hence the trend to larger and yet larger drives. you can reinstall your programs true but 2 TB, that's a lot of mp3's or photos. On a drive that size, i rather doubt it's ms office documents. for business, the data would be backed up anyway, (although you'd be surprised in the new client small business market).

True, but one of the reasons they are doing so is because of increased bandwidth speeds as well as increased storage - it means I can now go to NetFlix and do video on demand, without of running out of HD space when streaming HD quality video over the Internet, or whenever I want to make FLAC or OGG lossless recordings of my albums, etc.

The *usual* lament I hear from tech support when items get lost is that "I only really need that one folder, the rest were {insert media type} and I can get those again....

Of course, there has been the one or two clients who needed simply absolutely everything because their entire life's work (artist / photog) was on there....