Short Ride to 1-Tbyte Drives

5:40 PM -- Just because the first 1-Tbyte hard drives will be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next week, don't be fooled into thinking they are primarily consumer drives. (See Dawn of the Tbyte Hard Drive.) After all, does anybody have enough digital video, photos and music to take up 1 Tbyte on a home PC? OK, maybe your teenagers.

But these monster SATA drives are coming to an enterprise system near you soon enough, probably by the middle of the year. That's the timeframe from Hitachi Global Storage Technology (HGST) and Seagate.

HGST is showcasing its desktop PC 1-Tbytes drives at CES, expecting them to show up in shipping systems in March. (See HGST Drives to 1-Tbyte Disk.) Expect to see them next in digital video recorders, and finally in enterprise servers and storage systems.

Doug Pickford, director of product strategy for HGST, says that order was determined because retail PC makers can get the drives into their systems and out the door first. He expects at least half the 1-Tbyte drive market to be in the enterprise.

Seagate spokesman Michael Hall says he expects his company to ship desktop, consumer, and enterprise drives around the same time in the first half of the year.So don't fret. If those tiny 750-Gbytes SATA drives you're stuck with now aren't cutting it, you'll soon have plenty of expansion room. The trick will be keeping enterprise users from taking it up with their digital photos, videos, and music files.

Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch