Just saw a blurb about Western Digital’s new MyBook Pro II, a one-terabyte external drive for a ridiculous $549. (Ridiculously low, that is!) Here’s the skinny.
This isn’t the one terabyte drive that we should see before the end of the year–because this critter has two drives. Which also means that for $549 you can have a fully-mirrored 500GB RAID box with USB2 and FireWire connectivity (and backup software). That may be a more sensible use for this kind of capacity at this modest a price. For now.
As far as I can tell on coffee-break searching, Seagate still has the largest single disk, their 750GB unit. WD appears to top out at a mere 500GB per single disk.
The year still has three months to go.
Hi Walt,
I might be mistaken, but I think the LaCie 1 TB drive is single disk, for a mere 599 US:
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10188
I didn’t look closely, but their 2 TB drive looks to be definitely dual:
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10351
Hi Geoff,
I think further research is required here. The largest production hard disk I know of is Seagate’s 750GB drive; most competitors still top out at 500GB.
I was not aware that La Cie actually produced hard disks, as opposed to putting them in slick packages (I don’t see any internal drives on their website, and that arbiter of all truth, Wikipedia–sorry–doesn’t list La Cie as a surviving manufacturer of actual hard disks, as opposed to “hard drive” packages).
It seems unlikely that La Cie would be producing the highest-capacity single drive in the market and not making a lot of noise about technological breakthroughs, given how much noise Seagate’s made about its 750GB disk–but I could be wrong here.
Can anyone confirm whether or not the La Cie 1TB is actually a single disk, as opposed to a package containing two disks?
Geoff,
Looking further today, I came up with a Dell page that seems to answer the question, as follows:
“Store presentations, archive image banks or pre-press files, or exchange audio/video projects with the 1 TB 7200 RPM Big Disk Extreme with Triple Interface Hard Drive from LaCie. With FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and hi-speed USB 2.0 interfaces, this plug and play hard drive delivers data transfer rates of up to 800 Mbps, 400 Mbps and 480 Mbps respectively. Get a transparent, built-in RAID 0 array without complicated configuration with its compact 5.25″ 1U design. This drive’s aluminum body draws heat away from the internal disk toward the external casing, which absorbs and dissipates heat, keeping it safe and prolonging its life and reliability. In addition, a quiet ‘smart fan’ automatically adjusts itself depending upon temperature to protect the drive, and provide the quietest possible operation. Offering plug-and-play convenience, this triple interface hard drive is optimized for media professionals working with high-definition audio, digital video editing, SD video and 2D/3D imaging.
[My emphasis above].
So, as suspected, it’s a RAID unit, not a single disk/platter. Still an excellent bargain, to be sure.
Best guess as to when the first 1TB single disk hits the market? November 1? December 1? And from who (I’d guess Seagate)? I’ll go with “some time after October 15 and before December 1,” and that prediction is based on absolutely no information.