Breaking limits: Better living through storage

I'm not sure what it is today but there seems to be a lot of news from the storage front. First off is Hitachi's new Deskstar 7K100, which the folks at Gizmodo have tipped as "the Ultimate HTPC drive." Why? Well, it's the first 3.5-inch drive to offer a massive 1TB of storage, a direct result of the fact that its also the first drive to use perpendicular recording. What's more, the SATA drive spins at a respectable 7,200 rpm, which is much faster than you'd expect a such a lumbering beast of a drive to be capable of. While a single 1TB drive is cool, I can't think of very many enterprise applications that would require all that storage on a single drive as opposed to, say, two 500GB drives instead.

Speaking of breaking records, storage industry darling Samsung decided to have a crack at one as well: its new SpinPoint MP1 will be the first 2.5-inch drive to top off 200GB at 7,200rpm. While the company says that the drive aimed at RAID and blade servers, I wouldn't be surprised if it starts popping up in laptops, come May, when the drive will ship.

Finally, Dell has announced that 250GB, 2.5-inch drives will be offered on a select few Dell and Alienware laptops. No word on who's behind the 5,400rpm device but two of those puppies should satisfy even the most storage-obsessed mobile user.

For more on the new products:
- read Anandtech's review of Hitachi's 1TB beast
- see this press release for more on Samsung's SpinPoint MP1
- and this Engadget article for more on Dell's announcement