Four Terabyte Hard Drive by 2011

A BBC article reports that the Japanese computer firm, Hitachi, will be able to produce four terabytes (one trillion bytes) of storage on a single hard drive by the year 2011. This new technology was obtained by shrinking the read-write head of the hard drive to allow greater densities of data to be stored. The read-write head is now two thousand times smaller than one strand of human hair. The new computers, slated for 2011, will have enormous data storage capabilities, including the storage of more than a million songs. Hitachi believes that data storage will now double every two years into a ‘terabyte era’.

At about the 40 Gig mark, I

Submitted by on Tue, 10/16/2007 - 2:33pm.

At about the 40 Gig mark, I stopped quickly filling up all available hard drive space. That said, at work I do a fair amount of database crunching, so I do still have interest in massive data storage. But I think we've definitely reached the point where storage is practically unlimited for most people.

Right now, for the general public, the size of solid state drives are most interesting. They're smaller and more robust and thus great for consumer electronics. Still pricey though at the tens of gigs level.