Going for a Drive - Which Hard Drives are Winning the Space Race? North Las Vegas NV

Posted by : Joe De Rouen When I first started writing for technology magazines way back in 1994, the biggest hard drive that was commercially available was a whopping 1GB in size. (That sounds small now, unless you consider that, just three years earlier, the largest drive was just 100Megabytes.) Twelve years later, the size has increased nearly a hundredfold with the release of 400, 500, 750, and even 1,000GB (1,024would make it a terabyte!) drives.

This month, we'll take a look at a handful of some of the best drives--internal and external--available for the Windows PC that will give you a near-limitless storage capacity without breaking your budget.

Fishing For Barracuda

At a whopping 750GB,Seagate's new Barracuda 7200.10 is the company's fastest internal drive yet and their first 3.5-inch drive built on perpendicular technology. (Perpendicular technology is a method for increasing the drive's dependability and capacity by storing information vertically rather than horizontally, resulting in an increased data density and more gigabytes per platter.)This drive can hold 13,000 hours of digital music, 190,000 digital photos, 750 hours of digital video, or roughly 400 games. In other words, unless you're producing Hollywood-quality movies or downloading every MP3 known to man, it should be quite a while before you run out of storage space.

The drive connects via Serial ATA (SATA) and boasts an RPM of 7200, 16MB of cache, 300 Gs of non-operating shock resistance and, at only...

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