CES 2007: Hitachi’s 1 Terabyte hard drive

Imagine how much stuff you could store if you had a one-terabyte hard drive. You don’t have to: Hitachi Global Storage has helpfully supplied some suggestions.

1TB is enough for 333,000 high-res JPG photos, two years worth of MP3 tunes, 80 hours of uncompressed DV camcorder footage, or 125 HD movies. Cor.

As you may have guessed, the reason Hitachi is giving all these examples is because it’s just unveiled the world’s first, yes, 1TB hard drive. The Deskstar 7J1000 is due out by the end of March, is an internal hard drive, and will cost $399 in the US. That’s around 40 cents per gigabyte, people.

“It’s aimed at digital content creators, people that download movies, people who take high-res digital photographs, and people who want to edit their home movies,” says Hitachi’s Ron Baker. “All that takes up a lot of space.”

Baker says that the Deskstar 7J1000 is launching globally, so us Brits will be able to get our hands on it in the next few months too. So how soon will these kind of hard drives become properly popular beyond early adopters?

“I hear in Europe it’s going to be faster,” says Baker. “Because Europe doesn’t like DRM, so nobody’s going to buy the HD boxes, so how are you going to get the HD movies? People are gonna download them to their computers, so they’ll need this.”

Sportingly, Baker conceded that Hitachi’s main rival Seagate will probably have its own 1TB hard drive out in the first half of 2007 too. Good news for size kings and queens, anyway. Hitachi is also going to release a seperate 1TB model, the CinemaStar, aimed specifically at DVR applications.

Hitachi Global Storage website

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