The bitey drive from Seagate with a lot of storage.
The first hard drive that Seagate ever made was called the ST506, which fit into two 5.25in bays, and held a grand total of 5MB storage. Back when it was released in 1980, it cost many hundreds of dollars ($US1500 to be exact), and was more space than the average user knew what to do with. With a speed of 3,600RPM and access time of 85ms, this wasn't exactly what you'd call a performance drive. Boy, how far hard drives have come.
With manufacturing technologies constantly improving, and materials becoming available to take advantage of these refined techniques, what used to take up a huge amount of room can now be compressed down into the standard form factor of 3.5in. With 1,500 gigabytes of storage space and a rotational speed of 7200RPM, this drive has an access time of 13.7ms, an average read speed of 117MB/s, and an average write speed of 107MB/s, making this quite a fast drive.
This drive managed to remain pretty quiet during testing, and did not get too warm under heavy accessing (though some airflow across it can never hurt for longevity's sake). You'll be able to fit a lot of games on this drive, and this should be plenty of room for even above-average space users. Just keep in mind that if you're going to be RAIDing a couple of these together that if something goes wrong, you can potentially lose three or more terabytes in one go, so make sure you take adequate precautions.
Seeing how far this tech has come in 29 years is incredible. We've gone from $US300/MB in 1980, to $0.0016/MB in 2009. Put another way, you're getting 6.2GB for every dollar you spend - that kind of value is amazing, and it's only going to get better.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012