Hitachi announces 1 TB hard drive

Pre CES 2007 coverage - - Las Vegas (NV) - Hitachi this morning was first out of the gate to announce details about a 1 TB hard drive, which the company said will ship during the first quarter of this year. The announcement follows a brief statement by Seagate, which yesterday confirmed that it will also deliver a 1 TB drive within the next three months.

If your 500 or even 750 GB hard drive just doesn't cut it anymore, we have good news for you. The terabyte is about to begin, with Hitachi being the first company to announce such a drive, at least sort of: The drive isn't available just yet, but will be available "in limited numbers" in retail stores within this quarter, the company told us. In other words, if you really want such a drive, you'll be able to get one, if your keep watching those Sundays ads.

Besides the sheer capacity of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 drive, which provides 33% more storage space than the largest drive currently available on the market - Seagate's 750 GB Barracuda drive - the big news about the Terabyte drive is that it actually may be ringing in more competition for Seagate on the high-end, ultimately resulting in lower prices. Hitachi will sell the 7K1000 for about $400 retail, which compares to about $450 for Seagate's 750 GB drive.

Looking at the capacity of the Hitachi drive, which will be available with SATA and PATA interfaces and appear later on in the consumer electronics version called "Cinemastar 7K1000", you will be able to store 56 million pages of text or about 1 million ebooks. Hitachi noted that 18 terabyte drives would be enough to store the entire contents of the Library of congress, which currently holds about 18 million books. 1 TB is also enough to store more than 300,000 6-megapixel images, 250,000 MP3s, 1000 hours of standard definition video or 250 hours of high-definition video. Or, you could store the content of 20 Blu-ray discs.

Hitachi won't be alone with a terabyte drive for long, as Seagate told us yesterday that the company actually expects to be the first manufacturer that is shipping such a drive. And, Seagate appears to have the technological edge: While Hitachi is using five 200 GB platters (148 Gb/in2 density) to reach 1 TB, Seagate will be using four 250 GB platters, which indicates that Seagate will be announcing a new storage density record in commercial hard drives of more than 180 Gb/in2.

With the 1 TB milestone in mind, we can't help looking back at the history at hard drives. Hitachi reminded us that the first hard drive, released in 1956, stored 5 MB of data and was priced at $50,000 - or $10,000 per MB. 35 years later, in 1991, the industry had reached 1 GB and first mass-market gigabyte drives were entering the market around 1995 for about $500. Twelve years later, the industry has overcome serious concerns of how to keep increasing hard drive storage densities and is looking towards hard drives with multiple terabytes of storage capacity. Compared to a $10,000/MB price in 1956, a capacity of 1 GB is priced today at about 40 cents.

Total HD: The Warner Bros Solution To Format War

As the war of next-generation optical format rages on, Warner Bros decided to come up with its own solution. According to media reports, Warner Bros plans to unveil at the Consumer Electronics Show a DVD disc, called Total Hi-Def (Total HD) that would make it possible to play a movie in either a HD DVD player or Blue Ray player.

"The Total High-Definition Disc allows consumers to fully embrace high-definition viewing," Ron Sanders, President of Warner Home Video said in a statement Thursday. "Warner Bros. was a force in creating the current market dominance of the standard DVD, and we hope that THD will make it easier for the average consumer to enjoy this next level of technology."

Warner Bros didn’t release any details about their Total HD solution and also is still unclear if the company would license the technology to rival studios.

Also, Warner Bros has filled a patent for another invention could actually mean the premature ending of the HD DVD vs. Blu Ray war, which Sony and Toshiba have been fighting for quite some time

Movies on a DVD are stored at different depths depending on the technology. Blu-ray discs store information only 0.1 millimeter from the surface while HD-DVD discs store it at 0.6 millimeters.

But three Warner Bros. employees have come up with a new idea. By using reflective films, the inventors say their disc would enable the lasers to read the top layer and "see through" to the lower one if necessary. Additional information also could be stored on the other side of the disc.

The three men, two of whom are engineers, have filed a patent for a disk called "multilayer dual optical disk", which would have one layer of data in the standard CD or DVD format, a second layer able to play one high-capacity format and a third layer for the competing high-capacity format.

"A data disc consists of several layers, including at least one layer conforming to a first format, and a second layer conforming to a second format," the patent stated. "The formats can include CD, DVD, HD and BD formats and the layers may be physical, logic or application layers."

Also, LG is preparing to take CES by surprise and has announced it will present a player that is capable of playing both formats. But it remains to be seen if the end of format war will mean dual players or dual discs or another solution.

360 puts the X in Xmas

Xbox 360 came out on top in the US for Christmas, but Nintendo Wii fought a close battle.

According to research firm NPD Microsoft sold two million Xbox 360 consoles in the USA between the beginning of November and Christmas Day. Over the same period Nintendo sold 1.8 million Wii consoles.

Sony lagged behind with around 750,000 PlayStation 3 units, but that's not a bad figure considering the supply problems the console has experienced.

It would be interesting to see figures for Nintendo DS and PlayStation 2 though, which are likely to have beaten the more expensive next-gen hardware.

Source: CNBC