This has been an exciting year for the storage industry. Not only have notebook hard drives seen capacity jump up to 250 GB, but 3.5" desktop hard drives have finally reached the terabyte capacity point. These drives are the mainstays for enthusiast users as well as for data centers, with expensive SAS or SCSI drives are increasingly being replaced. 3.5" SATA storage serves as so-called near-line storage, which sits in between high-availability online storage based on RAID arrays, and offline storage, which is usually a backup solution. With the advent of Samsung's latest product family, the Spinpoint F1, the quartet of Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital is once again complete.