1-Terabyte-Drive PCs Coming from Dell

Dell is the first computer system supplier to ship 1 terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) hard drives.

The first Dell PCs to use the drives will be its own Alienware-branded gaming PCs. Dell will use Hitachi GST's 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 drive spinning at 7,200rpm with a 3GBit/s serial ATA interface. The drive uses perpendicular recording, has five platters, a read access time of 8.5msecs and a write time of 9.2msecs. It has a cache of 32MB and an 8.7ms average seek time.

Dell vice president, Neil Hand said: "This type of capability used to be available only to the largest corporations. With the spectacular advancement in hard drives and the engineering in our systems, we're now able to bring it to consumers."

Disk arrays using 1TB drives will face a RAID rebuild time problem as re-building data on drives to recover from a failed drive will take longer, and increase the likelihood of a second drive failure during the rebuild, meaning lost data. This will hasten the move to RAID 6-type schemes which can cope with two consecutive drive failures in an array.

Dell's 1TB drive is priced at $540.

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