The Spacious Terabyte Hard Drive

It wasn't many years ago that a terabyte hard drive seemed an unimaginable size for a hard disk drive. However, since hard drive manufacturers generally double the amount of storage on their drives every two to three years, we should have known once the 500GB drives became available, the terabyte would not be far behind. Well, the future is finally here! A terabyte of storage in one hard drive is a notable and memorable milestone. Hitachi had the honor of being the first to ship a 3.5-inch terabyte hard dive in the first quarter of 2007. Within a year, the other major hard drive manufacturers also started shipping these large hard drives.

Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) is just one of the many factors coming into play to create the terabyte drive. Perpendicular Magnetic Recording is a technology that that has been around for about ten years. Using this method hard drive manufacturers are able to squeeze more data per square inch into a relatively small case. The result: the terabyte hard drive.

How Large is a Terabyte?

The terabyte is represented numerically with a 1 followed by 12 zeroes. That's a thousand billion, or a million million. A big number. One thing to note is that Windows counts bytes differently than hard drive manufacturers do. Windows will tell you that your newly bought terabyte is only 931GB! The hard drive manufacturer did not rip you off. You still have a drive that holds one terabyte. The real problem is that Microsoft, due to historical reasons, still counts 1 KB as 1024 bytes. So, to come up with that 931GB figure, they divide a terabyte by 1024 three times.

Don't let yourself get distracted by this metaphysical battle between the drive manufactures and Microsoft. You still get a lot of storage. A terabyte can store approximately 1,000 hours of video or 250,000 four-minute songs. In all, it stores as much data as can be stored on the paper from 50,000 trees. Wow!

If you are looking for just a terabyte worth of storage, you could just get two 500GB drives. But if you want sleek, space-saving performance, a terabyte hard drive, although more expensive, is the way to go. As yet there are no laptop terabyte drives.

A Quick Comparison of Several Terabyte Competitors

Samsung, though often overlooked in it's hard drive department has really done an outstanding job in the expanding terabyte hard drive market. It was not the first to the market though. Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital all got their respective terabyte drives to the market before Samsung. So you may ask, what makes the Samsung terabyte drive so noteworthy? Let's take a quick look at what makes it superior to the other terabyte drives.

The Samsung Spinpoint F1 terabyte hard drive uses only three platters, each storing 334 GB to achieve the terabyte. Both Seagate and Western Digital have 250GB platters, and Hitachi uses 200GB platters. There are a number of benefits to be reaped with fewer platters. With less weight to spin, the drive will consume less power, generate less noise, and be more reliable overall. It's a huge advantage.

With a 32 MB cache, Samsung has created the perfect combination of storage and speed. A three year warranty on your hard drive also ensures outstanding performance for years to come. The 7,200 rpm speed of Samsung's whole line of F1 drives is compariable to that of other terabyte drive manufacturers. You may have noticed, Samsung offers different sized caches on the different capacity hard drives. The terabyte model comes with a whopping 32 MB cache while the smaller models come with 16MB or 8MB caches. If you love Samsung's F1 model line but don't need a terabyte, Samsung also offers 750GB, 500GB and 320GB drives.

Although the Samsung Spinpoint F1 terabyte hard drive is outstanding in it's class, Western Digital, Hitachi, and Seagate all have great terabyte drives. The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 set off the terabyte hard disk drive market first, followed by the Western Digital Caviar GP and Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11.

Conclusion

I have explored the top models of the terabyte hard disks available on the market today. If until now you have been limping along with a 320GB drive but have longed for additional storage space, consider giving the terabyte hard drive a try!

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