The 500GB hard drive barrier is being routinely broken now with two companies now offering this size disk for the desktop.

January 26th 2006 Western Digital announced the shipping of a 500GB Serial ATA (SATA) WD Caviar® SE16 desktop-class hard drive. The drives deliver 7,200 RPM with a 300 MB/s transfer rate, 16 MB cache and Native Command Queuing (NCQ).

Seagate, last year, started to ship their NL35 Series hard drives using high-performance Fibre Channel and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives in tiered storage applications.

Both disks are selling in the $350 to $450 range.

As videos and pictures become more common on home computers, the hard disk storage space is increasing apace. And the half terabyte level is only the beginning as new technologies (e.g., vertical orientation of the magnetic domains instead of horizontal) become mature, storage levels will jump accordingly. Expect one terabyte starting to be common by 2007 or so.

Of course, all this begs the question of how you back up all of that data. Hard disks are fairly reliable but can (and do!) fail; usually at just the time you don't want them to. Keep that in mind when you acquire one of these high-capacity disks.