Just sit tight and enjoy the 4 TB hard drive this stuff'll make possible beginning in 2011.

Uh huh. Seeing as how most people don't have a ton of money to throw around on new widgets, and how the computer industry seems to favor pricing things sky-high when they first come out, it'll probably be 2020 before someone like me can afford it, if then.

1TB drives can already be had for around $300. I wouldn't be surprised to see 4TB drives selling for under $100 by 2011. That's hardly out of most folks' budgets.

... the new Windows 2012XPWTFBBQ that *requires* the 4Tb drive.

....might just be enough to store ALL my downloaded Net porn in one convenient device!

Huzzah for Hitachi! ;)

Would this be anything like the difference between powertools that are double-insulated (2 prong plug) and similar ones that are grounded (3 prong)?

No?

Grounding someting to something else does seem to get rid of static.

How delightful for you that you can plop down $300 on something like this. Most people can't. Since I'm still seeing $150 price tags on drives that are 300 gigs, I'm not holding my breath for the super-duper fancy huge drives to be within my price range within four years.

Did it ever occur to you that the introduction of a 4 TD hard drive will drive the cost of that 300 GB drive down?

Oh and you need a new supplier if your paying that much for a drive. I can see them on CDW (not the cheapest place on the net by a long shot) right now for $90 or less. http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=974698

Sun spot was a little off on his price of a 1 TB drive, but he was close.

http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=1247372

10 years ago I paid $3500 for a 100 MHz system with 8 MB of RAM. Last week I spent just over $800 for a 1.8 GHz (DouCore) with 2 GB of RAM. So do us all a favor and stop with the evil computer companies are robbing us blind stuff.

Better than a box of 1TB drives I'd prefer an affordable 100GB SSD or some kind of high speed flash that approaches the speed of an SSD with a new bus speed interface. The time has come to eliminate the disk IO bottleneck. If I need 4TB I'll lash it to an external bus adapter or put it on a GB network wire.