Just how much storage do you need?

I still recall the first computer that I used--a white OEM-branded Intel 486-25 SX that my parents purchased for me as a student 15 years ago, and at a great cost. Come to think of it, I honestly cannot remember the capacity of the hard disk drive it had, but I am sure it couldn't have been more than a few hundred megabytes at the most.

You might just experience a similar flashback when you read about Seagate's new 3.5-inch desktop hard disk drive. Even though it sports the exact form factor as the hard disk in my first computer, its whopping 1.5 terabytes worth of storage capacity immediately puts a stop to any attempts at comparison.

The monstrous capacity is possible thanks to its four platters that are based on perpendicular magnetic recording technology, which arranges the magnetic bits in a vertical pattern to boast data density. Topped off with a 3Gbps SATA interface, Seagate says that the whole package is able to pump up a sustained data rate of 120 megabytes per second.

I don't know about you, but I personally have great difficulty filling up the 400GB hard drive that I bought at the beginning of the year. If that doesn't dissuade you from wanting to get this beauty, let me try something else: Just how do you to backup 1.5 terabytes worth of data?

Definitely not with any of your existing disk drives. - Paul