In January, Hitachi anounced that it would release a 500gb hard drive sometime this year. In late March it released more details, announcing that the drive would be released sometime in the second quarter and come in both ATA and SATA versions at $500 and $520 respectively.
In its article on the announcement, PCWorld notes that due to the limits of logitudinal recording, drives like this will top out at somewhere around 250gb per platter or 1.25tb on a 5-platter 3.5″ drive (PCWorld optimistically projects 1tb drives by the end of 2006).
They quote IDC’s Jim Buttress as claiming that disks featuring perpendicular recording methods should be show up for the desktop sometime in 2007. Toshiba’s perpendicular-based 1.8″ drives are almost certainly going to appear in larger-capacity iPods later this year, so that may not be far off.
And it can’t come soon enough. Currently I’ve got about 1.5tb in my home computer, and I still have to regularly archive stuff to DVD+R. How long till we can expect to see 100tb HDs?