Dell And Alienware Offer First 1 TB Single Drive Upgrade

Dell and gaming subsidiary Alienware have become the first PC makers to offer Hitachi’s single-drive 1 terabyte Deskstar 7K1000 drive in their boutique XPS, Aurora and Area-51 machines. Previously one could reach 1 TB of storage on these machines by buying two 500 GB drives.

Dell wants an extra $540 to upgrade your XPS from the standard 160 GB SATA HDD to the 1 TB monster, while Alienware wants $320 to go from the 500 GB HDD that comes as standard on the Area-51 and Aurora ALX machines - technically Dell wants less per GB than Alienware, but only just.

The 7,200 rpm HDD connects across a 3 Gbps SATA interface. It has 32 MB of cache and is rated at 8.7 ms for average seek time and 4.17 ms for average latency. In other words, it’s good for holding lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of p... stuff.