750GB drive

Seagate's 750GB drive

The existence of the 750GB from Seagate, although not yet official, proves that the quest for ever larger storage spaces is never-ending.

Likely to target the desktop drive market, I would think that the problem with such a large single drive is the possibility for failure. 750GB is a lot to lose from a single hardware fault.

As users - home, work and otherwise - we are now storing much more data than ever before. Our music collection, digital photos, even home videos are a prime source of data space in the home, and sometimes at work. For the business desktop it is applications, raw data (photos, spreadsheets and analysis output from databases) and for some more complex types, like virtual machine hard drives and others.

With 750GB you would be tempted to store a lot more, but a hardware failure (and it will happen) could wipe out parts of your entire life and existence. Imagine how upset you would be if you lost the only photos you had of your son, daughter or pet? At work, imagine losing all the work on a large project.

Backups, of course, are part of the answer, but any serious user would also be using a RAID solution - probably RAID 5 - to ensure that a failure didn't cause a blip in operation.

I can't help thinking that with such high drive densities (they are expecting 1GB before the end of 2006) that a better solution would be to look at a new format, perhaps one that combined three slim-line drives of, say, 300GB each and embedded a RAID 5 controller. Each individual drive would be replaceable, but the whole unit would be sold as a kit. You could probably make it about full-height, 3.5" in size, but you'd have a large, and reliable, 'single' drive for storing your data.

Cheap, affordable, easy to build, include and configure RAID for the small business and home market would be a massive boon, and you could still approach the sort of capacities people are looking for, while providing it in a reliable package.

Meanwhile, for those of us who know what we are doing, 750GB will help to reduce power requirements, cooling requirements and physical space. Time, perhaps, to think about replacing the current 6 drive/1.25TB solution, either with something physically smaller and larger capacity, or the same physical size and much larger capacity.