Even as analysts and industry watchers worry about the impact of rugged flash-based storage alternatives such as solid-state drives on the hard disk drive business, drive manufacturers such as Hitachi Data Storage, Seagate Technologies, Toshiba and Western Digital are breaking multi-terabyte capacity barriers in their latest hard disk models. Whether they are designed for the data center, critical business applications or the end user, there are several 1TB (or more) hard drive options on the market for anyone looking to join the TB HDD Club. There may be no reason to worry about whether buyers are going to abandon magnetic disk drives this holiday season in favor of SSDs. Research from iSuppli indicates hard disk drives are expected to receive a "late-year boost" as 169.2 million units will be shipped during October, November and December of this year. "HDDs continue to be the main storage device of choice in both the consumer and enterprise segments," according to iSuppli. Some of the drives are eco-friendly, have low power requirements and optimized for performance. These drives can be for laptops or desktops, have 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch form factors, or have SAS or SATA interfaces. The common denominator is that these drives deliver terabyte-scale storage capacities in small packages. While most of them perform at 6G bps, there are a few that are also available at lower 3G-bps throughput. – …