Say Hi To The 400GB Hard Drive

Are we far away from terrabyte hard drives?

Hitachi said today they have “the world’s highest capacity 3.5-inch ATA hard drive, the 400GB Deskstar 7K400”. The new drive has been designed for audio video The Deskstar 7K400 provides enough capacity to store the following:

• 400 hours of standard TV programming
• 45 hours of HDTV programming
• More than 6,500 hours of high quality digital music

That’s quite a lot of data. Although I have to say that despite having plenty of hard drives around the place, I’m still out of space. When is 400 GB going to sound like not very much, if it doesn’t already?

I guess sometimes I feel like this: The bigger hard drives get, the more we put on them. If you start putting video on a hard drive, it’s not going to be long before it fills up. Make a big hard drive, we’ll want to put all our DVDs on them. Then we make a bigger hard drive, we’ll want to put our whole life on them. Sadly, we’re never going to get to the point where we think ‘no worries, we’ve got more than enough space here.’ That, I fear, is never going to happen.