That’s one big hard drive!

Want a 4TB hard drive? Got four years to wait? Good, because that’s how long, according to Hitachi, it’ll take for us to see such drives, roughly keeping us on the double-storage-capacity-every-year track. Such a hard drive would be able to hold “more than a million” songs, says the BBC. (I have around 7,000 songs on my computer, which is probably around average.) Why, all of a sudden, is Hitachi able to cram so much data on a platter? The company has gone back to an earlier trick of hard drive manufacturers and, in effect, cleaned up the code, letting it store data more efficiently. No, the method itself isn’t particularly exciting, but the thought of having 4TB sitting on my desk in only a few years is not not exciting.

In other hard drive news, I accidentally re-formated one of my external drives at the weekend trying to figure out if I could, ::cough::, install Half-Life 2, its two subsequent episodes and Portal via Boot Camp. Thankfully, it was a newer drive so there wasn’t a whole lot on it, but let my complete stupidity be a warning to you all. What’s that message board meme? Jesus saves and makes incremental backups? Well Nicholas didn’t and now he looks like a (bigger) tool.

Drive advance fuels terabyte era [BBC News]