Harddrives to Hit 3TB Capacities By November
A TDK chart paves the road to 3 TB hard drives by November.
Softpedia reports that hard drive head manufacturer TDK released a chart revealing hard drive capacity updates for 2010. The chart indicates that-- for 3.5-inch HDDs--the company is moving from 500 GB per platter to 640 GB per platter.
This update means that hard drive manufacturers can now crank out HDDs with 2.5 TB storage capacities (using four platters), and five-platter HDDs offering a whopping 3 TB of storage.
The chart indicates that TDK plans to launch the update next month, with the new HDDs appearing on the market by November.
As for the smaller 2.5-inch form factor, hard drive manufacturers will be able to use the just-launched 375 GB platters as soon as this month. This will be a small bump up from the previous 320 GB platters, however storage makers will now be able to manufacture HDDs with 750 GB of storage using two platters.
According to TechConnect, 2.5-inch HDDs with 750 GB are expected to hit the market sometime this October. Still, with the release of SSDs, are mechanical drives a dying technology?

They'll certainly find a market in enterprise use, still the largest market for hardware. And I can imagine that workstations and certain home theater PC's could use that much storage.
And to reply to the question in the article: I don't think magnetic storage is dying just yet. It will have a massive pricing advantage for years to come and capacity is still far ahead. The best SSD's manage 1TB, but are nearly unaffordable. Meanwhile, dirt cheap 3TB drives are being prepared...
SSD's are great as a boot drive, maybe as a primary drive in higher end systems in a few years time, but I think that it will be at least a year or 3 before magnetic storage will start dying.
They'll certainly find a market in enterprise use, still the largest market for hardware. And I can imagine that workstations and certain home theater PC's could use that much storage.
And to reply to the question in the article: I don't think magnetic storage is dying just yet. It will have a massive pricing advantage for years to come and capacity is still far ahead. The best SSD's manage 1TB, but are nearly unaffordable. Meanwhile, dirt cheap 3TB drives are being prepared...
SSD's are great as a boot drive, maybe as a primary drive in higher end systems in a few years time, but I think that it will be at least a year or 3 before magnetic storage will start dying.
I agree with you entirely! In fact, maybe even 3 years is a very optimistic prediction given that magnetic hard drives make perfect sense for regular media storage. SSD could (and should) be used as the system drive, but why not have 8TB (in 3 years?) of magnetic hard drive for movies, music and general documents. I am sure that SSDs won't be quite on the cheap side 3 years from now. I'd say by 2015 or so, SSDs will be common place though.
One word: HD pr0n
I have 4 1 TB system, and it is getting filled up, if you rips everything that comes your way due to physical disk fails, you would know the feeling
granted I should really raid 5 this, but hardware raid 5s are expensive...
Especial BluRays from the renta... You know what I mean.
I have a 4.5GB RAID JOBD (3x 1.5GB) and its getting filled quite fast at 47GB per file.
inb4 tons of Windows XP users being unable to use the full capacity of their 3 TB hard drives...
12GB full? Oh my, where ever will that 12gb fit in 3TB?
I have a RAID5 server with 3x1tb and 3x1.5tb and 2 RAID5 cards - well worth the investement. Check out the Highpoint RocketRaid 2300 PCIe 1x cards, not hardware raid 5 but performance is better then Nvidia's RAID10 arrays.