Maxtor drive holds 1.8 million images

What would you do with half a terabyte of memory, which is enough to store 700 CDs, with plenty of room to spare?

Hard-drive manufacturer Maxtor aims to find out. With so many consumers snapping digital photos and storing music files, Maxtor executives said they are enthusiastic about the company's next-generation Serial ATA, or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment, hard drive, which can store up to 500GB, or half a terabyte of information.

Maxtor will ship its 7200RPM, 3Gb SATA and ATA 133 hard drives sometime between July and the end of September for use in consumer electronics, desktop computers, business applications and consumer external storage.

To provide some perspective, the 3.5-inch drives will be able to hold about 1.8 million 300KB images or 145 hours of quality video. Consumers could snap 50,000 JPEGs and still only use 5GB. A half terabyte of memory could handle about 100 DVDs or 250 hours of HDTV.

The new hard drives will compete for space in computer devices with similar 500GB offerings from LaCie, as well as upcoming products from Seagate and Hitachi.

In a recent report, analysts with the research firm iSuppli said demand for high-capacity drives is being fueled by the number of digital video recorders, set-top boxes and other high-capacity consumer devices.

"These applications typically use drives with capacities ranging from 160GB to 500GB," iSuppli said.

Maxtor said it would include the new hard drives throughout its product lineup, including the Maxtor QuickView, which powers consumer electronics such as digital video recorders and similar combination devices.

The new drives would also be cooler than previous designs and improve on data management, security, and audio/video stream detection, Maxtor said. The company also said that the 500GB hard drives would use fewer hazardous substances than earlier models to meet guidelines set by the European Union.

Maxtor

Hey hmm Maxtor I own 44,000+ shots on my drive allrdy.. I collect picutres of any thing just too see how many I can get. If u get a drive full of pics ship it my way>

Measuring storage space in images is ridiculous!

I realise that consumers often have no concept of raw storage capacity, and therefore manufacturers have to translate GB into "n images" or "n hrs of video" or "n DVDs"...

But rather amusingly (or perhaps that should be "confusingly") this article actually uses two different definitions of "image" in order to give an idea of the capacity of the drive. In the first instance it says that 1.8million 300KB "images" will fit on the drive's 500GB capacity (1800000*300/1024/1024 = 514), but it then goes on to say that 50,000 JPEGs (which are also "images", surely) will fit into 5GB, which means that each of these JPEG images is about 100KB (5*1024*1024/50000 = 105).

One can't help wondering why they don't decide on a single "standard" image size (as if there is such a thing, but they clearly want to pretend that there is), and why they don't pick the smaller 100KB size, which would allow them to claim that their 500GB drive holds 5 million images instead of a (mere) 1.8 million?!!!

Just my $0.02!

[Earl Benser]

It's nice, but not impressive...

I'm already running several 300 GB hard drives on my computers,
with the main Mac having over 1.8 TB total drive space, and the #1
satellite Mac with a bit more than 1 TB. So a 500 GB drive isn't all
that exciting. I would have expected Maxtor or WD to be out with a
full Terabyte hard drive by now.