Hitachi says they're on the way, soon. Finally, room for my cheesy SF movie collection in one place.

Why don't you just buy one of these? Almost 2 TB on effectively one disk (as far as the operating system is concerned) with redundancy and already shipping.

Because it takes up at least 2 1/2 times as much space as using a comparable 1 TB drive that's being proposed?

You can build rather large RAID arrays "as far as the OS is concerned", but that doesn't mean that they take up as little room as a 3.5" drive that can hold a full terabyte worth of data.

Logical volumes mean nothing if they take up gobs of physical space.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "gobs of space". The thing's smaller than the subwoofers on most gaming systems. You could pair the raid with one of these and together the two would take up less space than a standard desktop system but quieter and with less heat problems.

My primary home box currently has 1/3 terabytes of storage. I'm planning on putting together an A/V library machine with two 400 GB Seagate drives. The tentative name for the box is "Memory Alpha." I already have a Pioneer 300 disk DVD/CD changer. The effective data storage in that is over a terabyte.

Yes, it is fun watching the capacity go up. I still have an Apple 5 1/2 inch 140 KB capacity drive around somewhere. When I bought it in 1980, it cost over $600. I remember thinking how much storage that was. Literally over a hundred KB! Wow! And wouldn't it be neat to have a WHOLE MEGABYTE on one disk. Whoa!

The really hard question is, how is this data going to be backed up? That's one reason I like a RAID instead of one big disk. But even a RAID won't save you from inappropriate deletion of data (fumble fingers or a virus).

how is this data going to be backed up? How did people back up data when they first came out with a 1 GB drive?

Probably the same way data is backed up nowadays, with RAID arrays and other drives. When 1 TB drives are plentiful, it doesn't take much of a leap to put more than one into a RAID and back up the data real-time, especially if bus throughputs (like SATA) can keep a reasonable pace with space increases.