As we come to the end of the year, 2010 is going to be the age of multi-terabyte storage, with many manufacturers introducing 2TB hard drives. But how reliable will they be?

A new manufacturing process that will put 640GB on a single HDD platter, has allowed manufacturers to dramatically increase storage capacities drastically. As the 3.5-inch drives used in desktop PCs typically hold four or five platters, that suggests a whopping 3.2TB hard disk space of storage on a single drive. Looking at the likely timing, the new manufacturing technology could put the giant drives in shops as early as February next year.