At first glance, the idea of a one terabyte hard drive seems almost absurd. Who needs that much storage?
Anyone that question is probably only run a few office applications and surf the web. Anyone with a considerable amount of digital media automatically gets. In our main home system, we have a 500 GB RAID 1, with only about 130GB free and it is only with constant monitoring, uninstalling bulky games, and limit the amount of digital media stored on the system.
These days, the world of hard disks rotates more slowly than the rest of computer equipment; turnover takes four times longer (one year, for example) in other market areas, such as video cards. In many ways, this slower development is a good thing: the next generation of consumer-oriented hard drives reached the mega-size maximum of 750 GB, far more than most people need, even in these days the collections of the mass media, multi-concert performance systems and games that require DVD-sized plants. In this sense, raising the stakes to a terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) seems superfluous, but more space is not the only reason to reflect on new hard drives: want to see if it is faster delivery of information for all that space, too. Today, with the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000, currently the world's largest consumer hard drive, we aim to do just that through a series of tests.
Now the big question: does the additional 250 GB drive affect the speed at all? In addition to features now standard SATA disk as Perpendicular Magnetic Recording technology that enables these huge capacities, Hitachi 7K1000 he has an advantage over previous generations of hard drives: Both the 1TB and 750GB versions of the 7K1000 has 32 MB of cache, twice the size of any existing unit. Bigger cache means faster transfer of information, which is good. However, the unit also has five storage disks - more disks is equal to a longer search - which is bad.