Crave

(Credit: Seagate)

We gave an Editors' Choice award to the first round of Seagate's FreeAgent Go external hard drives, but as with all things related to storage (and storage only), bigger is better, so we're very anxious to get our hands on these new FreeAgents with up to 1TB of space.

Just announced Wednesday, the new line will look almost exactly the same as the original, but as expected, the 1TB version is a little chunkier than the rest. In addition to the original catalog, Seagate now offers 750GB ($200), 880GB ($210), and the 1TB ($250) version as well. Of course, the drives will continue to be supported by Seagate's comprehensive five-year warranty and are fully compatible with all of Seagate's external accessories, including the FreeAgent Theater Dock.

The new FreeAgents are available for order now on the Seagate Web site.

1.5TB is the new 1TB.

(Credit: Seagate)

Really, one terabyte isn't enough? If so, you'll be pleased to know that your insatiable need for more digital storage has left Seagate no choice but to announce the world's first 1.5TB hard drive. The half-terabyte jump over previous highest capacity 1TB drives, Seagate is happy to point out, represents the largest jump in capacity in hard-drive history. The 3.5-inch Barracuda 7200.11 uses perpendicular magnetic recording, which squeezes more 1s and 0s per square inch than conventional drives, to pack 1.5TB of storage space over four platters. Seagate isn't sharing pricing details yet. The drive will begin shipping in August.

Also today, Seagate announced a pair of 500GB laptop drives, the Momentus 5400.6 and the Momentus 7200.4. These 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm 2.5-inch drives won't ship until Q4 of this year.

[Press release]

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B spreads 1TB of capacity over only three platters.

(Credit: Hitachi)

Hitachi was first to hit the terabyte mark when it announced the 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive in January 2007. Fast forward a year and a half, and the company is back with not a larger version of the drive but a more efficient model in the Deskstar 7K1000.B. Like its predecessor, the 7K1000.B is a 3.5-inch, 7,200rpm hard drive that serves up 1TB of storage space and a 32MB buffer. It hits that magic terabyte mark, however, by using only three disks--down from the five-disk design of the older 1TB drive. It also borrows from Hitachi's 2.5-inch mobile drives and includes Bulk Data Encryption.

Hitachi says the new three-disk design improves idle power consumption up to 43 percent compared with last year's model. Fewer platters should also mean improved reliability, acoustics, and seek times. The Deskstar 7K1000.B also matches Samsung's Spinpoint F1, which was the first three-disk drive to offer 1TB of capacity.

While desktops go missing at a much slower rate than laptops, that didn't deter Hitachi from offering Bulk Data Encryption on the Deskstar 7K1000.B. This feature encrypts data as it is written to the drive and decrypts when it's retrieved. This hard drive-level security is superior to software or system-level security measures, and it has no impact on system performance.

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B will sell for $239 when it starts shipping later this month. Hitachi will also ship the Deskstar E7K1000 this month for $279, an enterprise version of the drive designed for low-duty-cycle, 24x7 applications.

My name is Justin Yu, and I'm a digital pack rat. That's right, my hard drive is ultra cluttered with bad photos, ancient MP3s, and obsolete software, but I can never bring myself to trash them--who knows when I'll need that essay I wrote in middle school on Benjamin Franklin? I know that as soon as I empty the trash can, someone's going to ask for that blurry picture of their knee I took back in '98.

Iomega looks like they have my affliction covered--the company just released a 1TB version of the popular eGo desktop hard drive in three colors: black, blue, and red. These hot swappable USB 2.0 drives are going for $269.95 and are available today. The design is based on the popular eGo portable drives and look a lot like a flask, with rounded edges and a matte finish. With 1TB of space, I can happily keep my files safe and secure for decades to come...uh-oh...

(Credit: LaCie)

LaCie has been pimping its designer good looks for the last several months, but the company also wants us to know that it's not just another pretty face. To wit: It just debuted a 1-terabyte external hard drive that emphasizes its power and capacity more than appearance. (It's just an upright black box, a la 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

The drive is the largest of three externals LaCie is releasing, according to Engadget, the others being another desktop model of 250GB to 500GB in size and a mobile disk that ranges from 80GB to 320GB. All of which is well and good, but we'll always have a soft spot for the "Golden Disk."

It's the notebook for neurotics.

Asus, the Taiwanese computer maker, will come out with a notebook that sports two 500GB hard drives from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. Combined, this will give a fully configured Asus M70 notebook a terabyte of storage.

Put another way, the notebook will be capable of storing 1,000 hours of video, or more than 350 feature length movies, or 250,000 four-minute songs. That will probably tide you over for even the worst airport layovers. A terabyte also holds about the same amount of data that could be stored on the paper from 50,000 trees.

Asus will also release notebooks with a single 500GB drive.

Behold the Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.

(Credit: Hitachi Global Storage Technologies)

Hitachi's Travelstar 5K500 drive, coming in February, is the highest-capacity 2.5-inch drive to date, according to Hitachi. The drive, like most cutting-edge hard drives being made these days, features perpendicular recording, which allows more data per square inch than conventional drives.

Hitachi will also come out with a 400GB version in the first quarter. These drives record data on three platters. The prices on the drives and the notebooks were not revealed.

A related drive, the Travelstar E5K500, is due by the end of the second quarter, also in both 400GB and 500GB versions. The "E" in the model number apparently stands for "enhanced availability"--this drive is intended for lower-transaction environments working round-the-clock, including blade servers, network routers, point-of-sale terminals and video surveillance systems. Clarification: We were initially unclear on the drive that's due in Q2. As noted in this paragraph, it's the E5K500.

A few years ago, a terabyte of storage was an astronomical amount of storage. Sony showed off a home storage device at Ceatec in Japan in 2004 with a . The unit cost about $5,000.

Hard-drive manufacturers, however, have managed to double the amount of storage on their drives about every two years. (During the late 1990s, they were doubling storage capacity annually.) Thus, the astronomical becomes conventional pretty quickly. Desktop terabyte drives with larger 3.5-inch-diameter platters started appearing last year. (Hitachi came out with the first.) These drives sell for around $400.

Analysts and self-employed experts often scoff at the increase in storage, claiming customers won't need more storage. Drive execs, however, note that the public continues to gobble up as many gigabytes as they can shovel out the door. The advent of high-definition video and digital video recorders has been a boon for hard-drive makers.

Some drive makers, notably Seagate Technology and Western Digital, are even making money, which can be rare in this business. (Hitachi, which bought IBM's drive business, often loses money and is looking at ways to sell of its hard drive division.)

Casinos are also big consumers of drives, according to hard-drive execs. What do you think they store all that surveillance video on?

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.

(Credit: Buffalo Technology)

Along with the TeraStation Pro II, Buffalo Technology announced its new DriveStation Quattro USB 2.0/eSATA external hard drive at CES 2007. Combining four 7,200rpm drives in 1TB and 2TB configurations, it is capable of data transfer rates of up to 100MB per second, according to Buffalo. The drives can be arranged in RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 5 arrays for improved performance and data security. Buffalo also bundles Memeo AutoBackup for Windows. Unlike the TeraStation Pro II, the four drives aren't swappable.

When connecting the Quattro to your Windows or Mac PC, you can use either a USB 2.0 connector or eSATA, which allows you to connect an external drive directly to your system bus.

Both capacities will be available in late January and will cost $600 for the 1TB and $1,000 for the 2TB.

(Credit: Buffalo Technology)

Small to midsize businesses have a new tool from Buffalo Technology--the TeraStation Pro II--a four-drive NAS (network-attached storage) array with Gigabit Ethernet and Gigabit Jumbo Frame capability. It comes in 1TB and 2TB capacities and, according to Buffalo, is capable of data transfer rates of up to 35MBps. Two onboard USB ports let you attach hard drives for additional storage capacity.

The four Serial ATA drives are easily swappable and can be arranged in a variety of RAID arrays, including RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10. For data backup, Buffalo bundles Memeo Autobackup for Windows, though the drive is Mac-compatible as well.

The drive should be available at the end of the month for $1,000 for the 1TB version and $1,700 for the 2TB version.