Hitachi ships its terabyte drive

If you've got $399 and a burning need to story 1 terabyte of data, Hitachi has the drive for you.

(Credit: Hitachi)

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is now available at retailers like CDW for a suggested retail price of $399. The company announced the drive earlier.

Although hard drive makers compete in a difficult market that often results in losses for many companies, their engineers nonetheless move at a blistering pace. Hard drive capacity continues to double about every two years, which leads to higher capacity at lower prices.

How much is a terabyte? It's enough to hold the same amount of information as 50,000 trees chopped up and turned into paper, according to the How Much Information study from UC Berkeley.

[DMAN3k]

No Hybrid

I'm not buying it until it becomes a hybrid. It's already May 07, and they aren't thinking hybrids yet?

The problem with the current ready-boost is that it still go through bus or hyper-transport, which make it act like RAM, so if you got enough RAM, ready-boost is useless. Hybrid-drives are direct to solid state to CPU. 4GB of Solid state memory is like $40... so it can't be that much to put it in, minus cost of research in technology.