I always pondered this question alot. How big is the biggest hard drive in the world? Does anyone know? I'm sure you cannot buy it at the store. And also, what's the biggest hard drive you can buy at the store? Because I need a quite large one for all my movies and mp3 and games. anyone please?

This post has been edited by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG: Dec 16 2005, 07:07 AM

I believe the biggest you can buy at the store is 500gb, however I wouldn't know about the biggest on in the world. I would guess somewhere in the 1-5 TB range.

To my knowledge, the largest capacity packed in a single hard drive unit is 500GB, which are commonly available on the store shelves for individuals.

There are a number of external storage boxes configured to hold like 2TB, making use of multiple hard drives inside the box.

The needs for larger storage capacity in the enterprise world is supported by enormous number of arrayed disk drives, than putting the data onto one disk. Therefore the capacity of such storage system can be really huge.

By the way, your question title reminded me of my days i was selling 9" hard drives carrying only a few hundred of megabytes --- yes they were big too,,,
physically. <grin>

yeah from what i googled the biggest is 500bg but then the next question would be the biggest harddrives connected to a network how about htat.

I found a company called Lacie out of France that marketed this 2TB Monster hard drive.

Also when considering network size and drives within wouldn't Seti be the largest. At least with them if you figure, all the drives they use over their network which uses a ton of computers.

I have seen the biggest hd at 800 gb from pricewatch. Although the company dosent sell them. And I was going to say the same this sodredge said :/ but he got to it first.

I know that at my fathers company they work with harddisks of about 2TB(maybe more, but not sure) and then they use several of them combined. But that computers are quite big, somewhere near 2m x 3m x 1m (height x width x depth). Of course harddisks will have more capacity in future and less big but I don't want to have such a creature in my living room, do you?

-=jeroen=-

Off topic - but my first ever computer had a 3.5" HDD (in the days of huge bulky ones - way back in 1991's) with a WHOPPING CAPACITY OF 20 MEGABYTES Those days that used to be one of biggest hard drives around the block

You can find many IHV (independent hardware) companies like LaCie offering RAID subsystems, in which many cases they utilize 4 units of 500GB hard drives.
For the ease of installation, products aimed at SOHO and individual enthusiasts are often built in tower chasis.

For corporates, a 2TB unit is made out of 4 x 500GB drives more often laid out in a "rack" (imagine something like a flat big tray.)
There are solutions like stacking multiple racks to be connected through fiber channels to the server. If you had 7 racks stacked that'll make 14TB, for example.

In reality, however, corporate storage solutions would generally sacrifice a lot of raw capacity for security and backup. They use techniques like RAID to reserve a part of capacity to achieve higher reliability. In other words, the capacity made available to store data is much less than plain sum of the disk capacity used.

the "hard drive" u mentioned is an box of stroage 2tb isnt huge infact i have it in one computer lets see 8x 200 is what nearly 2 tb and i could always grab some 320gigs or bigger i belive 500 u will find is the bigest and easiest to get your hands on