I don't get it. I've been using TB drives from LaCie for months. They are 600 bucks or so each (I'm sure that will go down now) and work beautifully. Why is this news? I know they're French and all, but at least mention LaCie's product.

Previous poster is correct, also the article is about an internal drive, which are generally much smaller then the external drives.

As far as the seagate drive, I remember there being a PCworld article about introducing either the 750 or the 1TB versian, but I dont remember it being a normal 3.5" hard drive. Not sure though.

Having two different companies saying they are the first is not unheard of though, we wont see who is really first till they release. June is not definately going to be earlier then Hitachi's drive.

If you take out the platters, and you're not in a "clean room" (100% dust and debris free room) then you will destroy the platters, making data transfer impossible. The platters are especially delicate and a speck of dust will destroy any data on the platter. There's no use in making the platters easier transferable. The only people who should be transferring the platters are data recovery specialists in a clean room.

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Saving the drive without ruining the data was a pretty easy thing a few years ago. Ok - maybe MORE than a few years ago. Anyway...

As long as it wasn't a fatal head crash, you could remove the circuit board on the bottom of the drive, and plug in a new one from a duplicate drive. Fire it up, and a way you go again. Now the boards are all hidden inside... Bad design move if you ask me. Good business move though: Forces users to buy new drives.

Would be a nice feature for a manufacturer to bring that back. They might lose out on /new/ drives, but I bet the manufacturer who did it would have a LOT of repeat buyers. Especially now with 1TB stored on a drive and 400 a pop for the stinkin' things.

C'mon Seagate - ya been good to me so far - bring back the replaceable drive board..!