Maxtor Releases Half-terabyte PC Hard Drive

Seagate announced it earlier this month, and now Maxtor has caught up: a half-terabyte of storage on your home PC is now an affordable reality.

"On the PC, Maxtor's new 500-GB drives will be available as either the DiamondMax 11 or as part of an Ultra16 upgrade kit, which will retail for a suggested price of $349.95.

All of the new drives include a 16MB buffer and are available with 3.0-Gbit SATA II features including native command queuing (NCQ), staggered spin up, hot-plug and asynchronous signal recovery.

Maxtor's new drive offerings also include 400- and 500-GB versions of is QuickView drives for PVRs and other CE applications, which have been enhanced with ATA 7 Streaming Commands for multistream video management. In PVR terms, 500 gigabytes can store up to 89 hours of HDTV or about 500 hours of standard-definition video."

This has exciting implications for audiogeeks; as storage capacity becomes less and less of an issue, lossy formats like mp3 will be replaced by nearly perfect formats like flac.

Hat Tip: SG

~0.5 GB HD? Nice.
Is it true that there's a 1-TB (terabyte) HD external drive that costs about $1200? Or am I wrong?

-Snoopy

Youre wrong. You can get a firewire 1TB drive from here (http://www.pricewatch.com/) for $800. Look for that price to be dropping soon.

Thanks for the info, DonDaddy!
FireWire--that's incredibly fast data transfer. My friend has it and has several cables which utilize it to transfer information between his three computers.

-Snoopy

"FireWire is a cross-platform implementation of the high-speed serial data bus -- defined by the IEEE 1394-1995, IEEE 1394a-2000, and IEEE 1394b standards -- that can move large amounts of data between computers and peripheral devices. It features simplified cabling, hot swapping, and transfer speeds of up to 800 megabits per second (on machines that support 1394b)."

800 Mbps is pretty slow when you are talking about 1TB of information.

I think that i should get me some of that and the terabyte stuff. oh yea what comes after TB i know it's PB something?

Pitabyte, I think. And after that, it's...what is it, exa-, yotta-, zotta-, or did I read something else? Or am I forgetting something?

-Snoopy

bit
byte
kibibit
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kibibyte (binary)
kilobyte (decimal)
megabit
mebibyte (binary)
megabyte (decimal)
gigabit
gibibyte (binary)
gigabyte (decimal)
terabit
tebibyte (binary)
terabyte (decimal)
petabit
pebibyte (binary)
petabyte (decimal)
exabit
exbibyte (binary)
exabyte (decimal)

Youre wrong. You can get a firewire 1TB drive from here (http://www.pricewatch.com/) for $800. Look for that price to be dropping soon.

Wish I would have known about this a few months ago before I dropped much too much on a 2 TB mobo.

The first place you should always look before buying anything for your comp is pricewatch. It has saved me plenty of money over the years.