Seems I’ve got hard drives on the brain today. Stumbled across a Western Digital press release about their new 500GB hard drive:

LAKE FOREST, Calif. - Jan. 26, 2006 - Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC) today announced it is shipping its new high-capacity 500 GB Serial ATA (SATA) WD Caviar® SE16 desktop-class hard drives. Providing a half terabyte of capacity for data-intensive applications such as graphic design, digital video editing, personal video recorders and advanced business computing, WD Caviar SE16 500 GB drives also deliver high 7,200 RPM performance with 300 MB/s transfer rate, 16 MB cache and Native Command Queuing (NCQ).

“The WD Caviar family of hard drives delivers the reliability and performance that customers expect from WD,” said Don Bennett, WD vice president and general manager of desktop storage. “The extreme capacity and high performance of this drive address a variety of demanding applications and expand WD’s portfolio of storage products. From 6 to 500 GB, WD offers a diverse range of hard drives to meet our customers’ wide-ranging storage needs.”

How much will this monster set you back? A mere $349.99 through WD’s own online store with free shipping to boot. That’s cheap at twice the price. That 1GB hard drive I mentioned having used back on my old Amiga? Yeah, it cost something on the order of $2,000 or so. Which is why I had it on loan.

Hmmmm. A half-terrabyte gaming PC would be pretty damn wicked…