Half a freakin' terabyte
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Today, hard drives are measured in hundreds of gigabytes. Soon it may be terabytes, and we'll look back on the gigabyte wondering how we ever got along with so little storage. We're really halfway there already. Hitachi's Deskstar 7K500, currently the largest desktop hard drive on the market, offers an awe-inspiring half-terabyte of storage. 500GB in a 3.5" form factor that was bursting at the seams with just 20MB so many years ago.
Storage would be pretty stagnant if additional gigabytes were all new hard drives had to offer, but there's more to the Deskstar 7K500 than its copious capacity. The drive also comes equipped with a generous 16MB cache, as well as support for 300MB/s Serial ATA transfer rates and Native Command Queuing—all the bells and whistles you'd expect from a high-end drive. But does it have enough punch to keep up with the latest from Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital? Read on to find out.
