Terabyte drives here and now, and next-generation, dual-format writers in the pipeline from Hitachi.
We've already made mention of Hitachi's intent on shipping its massive 1TB hard drive by March. Speaking to Hitachi representatives, we learned that the 3.5in drive may well ship slightly sooner than the current end-of-March estimate. Good news for storage freaks and users of small form factor PCs with only a single 3.5" bay.
The drive uses the perpendicular recording technology that's similar to Seagate's Barracuda ST375064AS 750GB model which has been shipping for around 9 months now.
$900 will buy you a PC-based Blu-ray writer from Hitachi-LG's optical stable. The GBW-H10N drive, able to write at 4x, has been shipping for a short while but the exorbitant price and inability to write to dual-layer discs has kept most punters waiting for a newer model with a better feature-set.
With that in mind, Hitachi-LG has announced a multi-format drive that's similar to LG's full-size dual-format standalone player. The new drive, then, will play both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs but write to Blue-ray only. Hitachi-LG representatives indicated that it will ship by the end of March 2007.
