Wow. Seagate just announced the world’s first 3TB drive. Called the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk, it’s big enough to hold about 1,000 full-length HD movies or one million digital photos or songs.
It is also twice the size of the Seagate drives we used in the Backblaze Storage Pod when we published the design in September. Switching to the 3TB hard drives in our Storage Pods would mean one Backblaze Storage Pod would hold 135TB of data: 45,000 full-length HD movies or 45 million digital photos or songs. That is one monster collection of media.
The Seagate 3TB hard drives are only available for external use at this point, so we can’t actually put them into our Storage Pods—but we’re keeping an eye out. If you want one one of these drives for yourself, they’re $250 at Seagate. (Note that you need to be using a 64-bit OS to take advantage of all the space.)
For my estimates, I’m assuming an HD movie is 3GB (as “Hot Tub Time Machine” on iTunes is when I just looked at it a second ago) and a photo or song is 3MB (as they are with a five megapixel camera and downloaded from iTunes, respectively).
