A few months ago, I saw a 500-gigabyte hard drive at Fry’s. That’s when I realized that terabyte* drives were not far away.
Oh, sure, you’ve been able to put together multi-terabytes of storage using RAID arrays and clusters, but we’re talking something the average consumer will be able to walk into a store and buy. Something that the slightly-above-average consumer will be able to put in his computer with just a screwdriver and a cable.
It won’t be long. CNET reports that Hitachi anticipates a 1-TB drive by the end of the year.
Naturally, anyone who installs one of these will probably fill it up within a week.
Edit: Something just occurred to me. In light of Mezzoblue’s recent article on naming drives, I’ve come up with the perfect name for my first terabyte drive: Ivan.
*Either 1,000 gigabytes or 1,024 gigabytes, depending on which definition you’re using. Is there a consensus yet?
What you need now is a bridge to terabytia.