Click's Ian Hardy investigates the latest developments in data storage. A hard drive that stored your entire music collection and hundreds of 1.3 megapixel photos on an 80 - yes 80 - gigabyte drive. Computer power gets greener with these now 2TB hard drives It sounded good in 2000. But now, almost a decade later, Western Digital have become the capacity leader and released a 2TB hard drive. It is from their GreenPower line and uses 33% less juice and is quieter and cooler than most other hard drives. Dale Pistilli of Western Digital said the new drives would also generate less heat when operating. "Heat is not the best friend of hard drives. That is one of the things that puts the most strain on the system." But if a 2TB hard drive is impressive, then just imagine a card. Card capacity The new Secure Digital Extended Capacity (SDXC) cards only exist as mock-ups at present, but the initial capacity will likely be 32GB with a transfer speed of 104MB per second. As capacity grows on drives and cards, consumers fear losing more and more data in one go

The 2TB number is a theoretical maximum that may not be achieved for years. And of course hardware manufacturers will have to produce devices capable of recognizing the updated format. James Taylor, of the SD Association said: "I would think within 12 to 18 months you'll start seeing the first SDXC card products. "We estimate that the first products will be digital stills cameras and video cameras." SD cards now dominate consumer electronic devices. It is all about cramming more bytes into less space. Micro SD cards have been around for several years and you may think this tiny card, which was designed for small gadgets like a phone, would only be able to hold a couple of gigabytes of data. But the new Micro SDHC holds 16GB. Devices like the iPod Touch and iPhone, with permanent installations of flash memory, are now commonplace. Solid state drives boot up faster than hard drives and need less power. In 2007, 32GB cards cost $600 (£421). But prices have dropped since. Doreet Loren of Sandisk said: "Today we can find 120GB for $250 (£175). That's actually a much more attractive price than we've seen before. "We're beginning to be in the ballpark of what's actually acceptable for replacing the hard disc drive." Losing data But as capacity grows on drives and cards, consumers fear losing more and more data in one go, with entire music, video and photo collections evaporating from the same drive. The cost of date storage has been falling dramatically in recent years That is one reason why multi-drive machines and network-attached servers are becoming more popular with consumers. Traditionally difficult to set up, the latest versions like, the 4TB Sharespace and MyBook, have pre-configured RAID technology that automatically backs-up data. The Drobo is ready out of the box and copies data across four discs simultaneously for maximum safety. If one fails, it can be replaced in a few seconds with no loss of files. But as consumers get used to managing terabytes of data, they quickly realise moving it around can now take days. USB 2 and Firewire 800 suddenly feel sluggish. But the answer may be on the way. The answer could lie with USB 3 as John ONeill of Symwave said: "This will enable consumers to do back-ups and transfer files at 10 times the speed of existing technology". So what is the bad news? Well you will need a new PC with additional hardware and software for one and the tantalizing data transfer speeds of 5GB per second that are often quoted are ... yes you guessed it ... theoretical.



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