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.

Manufacturers such as Western Digital, Samsung, TDK and Hitachi are all introducing 2TB+ drives and the other manufacturers will not be far behind. However if you are storing this amount of data, is a single HDD the answer? Given the well-documented manufacturing problems with many of the 1TB drives, should users be more cautious?

Well in our opinion the answer should be a resounding yes. New technology is always fraught with teething problems and it often takes several generations of media, before a reliable product is found. Although companies like Hitachi are spending large research budgets on developing this technology, the mean time before failure (mtbf) cannot be accurately calculated until the product has been on the market for a while and all failures carefully analysed by the manufacturer.

Given the minute tolerances within a HDD and the associated heat dissipation issues, my advice would be to stick with lower capacities for the time being and even RAID them together for added security. RAID data recovery is always a possibility if the RAID drive fails.  Hitachi still remain at the top of our list of the most reliable manufacturer, but I would sit tight until the new technology is proven.