Samsung joins the terabyte circle with its new HD103UJ; Western Digital follows up with a Green Power RAID Edition drive.

This has been an exciting year for the storage industry. Not only have notebook hard drives seen capacity jump up to 250 GB, but 3.5" desktop hard drives have finally reached the terabyte capacity point. These drives are the mainstays for enthusiast users as well as for data centers, with expensive SAS or SCSI drives are increasingly being replaced. 3.5" SATA storage serves as so-called near-line storage, which sits in between high-availability online storage based on RAID arrays, and offline storage, which is usually a backup solution. With the advent of Samsung's latest product family, the Spinpoint F1, the quartet of Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital is once again complete Compare Prices on Samsung Spinpoint F1 1 TB.

We've received an interesting study from Fleishman-Hillard, which deals with the storage requirements for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). In the study, 234 businesses were asked 21 questions to find out, among other details:

• What their businesses are like;
• What amounts of data need to be handled today;
• Whether the time slot available for backup is sufficient (backup performance);
• What the main criteria are when investing in storage solutions;
• What their intended investments are for 2008;
• How much their capacity requirements have increased during the last three years;
• Which technologies are being used; and
• How much they spend on storage.

We'll talk about two of these factors later in this article. It is obvious, however, that all of the important factors - such as cost, capacity, reliability and performance - must be considered to find an appropriate storage solution for your applications.

The availability of terabyte hard drives at well below $300 is not only important for corporate customers that need to create large-capacity storage with a minimum drive count, it also opens up new options for end users: a 1 TB drive is large enough to hold all of our personal data for the next few years, at least for the very vast majority of us. It is also large enough to store a decent amount of High Definition content, and a single 1 TB drive could be used to back up multiple computers at home. A single 1 TB drive is large enough to replace two or three older hard drives by a single one, which is easier to manage. But using a 1 TB as system hard drive may bring with it the need to upgrade your existing backup resources. Finally, larger hard drives will also contribute to further price drops of mainstream capacities such as 400 and 500 GB.

Not only is Samsung's new Spinpoint F1 a valuable addition to the existing terabyte drive offerings. It is also a multi-faceted product family that can address capacity demands, performance requirements and also cost pressures.

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