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Prime Drive Time

Sleek, capacious hard disks are making a new place for themselves in the home and on the road. We look at what's here and what's next.

Jon L. Jacobi

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Archos's ARCDisk packs 20GB in the palm of your hand.

Archos's ARCDisk packs 20GB in the palm of your hand. Photograph: Marc Simon
It's a hard-drive industry mantra: Each succeeding generation must be faster and fit more data into less space. But while performance gains have been modest recently, areal density (gigabytes per square inch) continues to grow. The result: roomy desktop drives, tiny portable hard drives that hold truly useful amounts of data, and other new products such as easy-to-install network-attached drives for homes and small businesses. And you can expect to see new functions and greater capacities in 2004.

Less Is More

A couple of years ago, adding an external drive meant choosing between easily portable low-capacity models and bulky high-capacity units. But that has gradually changed as hard-drive makers squeeze additional storage into ever-shrinking forms. Consider the smaller-than-a-floppy Archos 20GB ARCDisk ($250; no other capacity currently available). Based on Hitachi's 1.8-inch DK14F1-20 mechanism and weighing only 2.7 ounces, this highly portable USB 2.0 drive sips power so parsimoniously that you usually don't need its AC adapter: It can run off of USB power alone. LaCie uses Toshiba's similar 20GB drive in its nearly-as-small Data Bank ($299), and the company plans to use Toshiba's 40GB model in future Data Banks.

Though both the LaCie and the Archos run a bit warm in constant use, both units make a great higher-capacity alternative to flash memory drives for your sneakernet or commuter net. (See "Little Drives, Big Promises" for more about thumb drives.)

Internal drives remain far more cost-effective, of course. And people who want capacities above today's 300GB maximum won't have long to wait. Drive makers have announced technology (or actual drives) capable of raising areal density to permit drives of 400GB, 500GB, and even 1 terabyte in the next couple of years, say industry experts. Seagate's 200GB Barracuda 7200.7 SATA drive will ship before year's end for about $200. It utilizes a pair of double-sided platters (each holding 100GB on board, up from 80GB); this lowers the number of moving parts, increases reliability, and reduces overall drive costs for makers. Maxtor's PMR technology can pack a whopping 175GB maximum per platter, but it is farther from production; the company has not released any specifics on drives using this technology.

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