Hitachi announces first 2TB, 7,200 RPM hard drive

The five-platter drive offers vastly better power ratings
Computerworld - Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. announced today that it is shipping what it said is the world's first 2TB, 7200 RPM hard disk drive, the Deskstar 7K2000.

The 3.5-inch, 2TB Deskstar is a fourth-generation device that uses Hitachi's five-platter design using perpendicular magnetic recording technology, which stands bits upright on the platter in order to pack them more densely.

The drive has a 32MB cache and a 3Gbit/sec. SATA interface. It also offers 10% idle power savings over previous generations. On a watt-per-GB basis, idle power has improved more than 120%, Hitachi said.

"With the introduction of the industry's first 7200 RPM 2TB HDD, Hitachi GST is building a tradition of time-to-market leadership for delivering the biggest and fastest disk drives for capacity-hungry PC users, given it was also the first HDD vendor to ship a 1TB HDD, the Deskstar 7K1000, in early 2007," said John Rydning, research director for hard disk drives at market research firm IDC in a statement.

Brendan Collins, vice president of marketing, Hitachi GST, said in a statement that the 2TB drive is intended for gamers, workstations and desktop RAID arrays.

In addition to the new 2TB Deskstar, Hitachi is refreshing its 7200 RPM Deskstar 7K1000.C desktop drive family, which will have as much as 500GB per platter, and will come in capacities of 160GB to 1TB. Like previous generations, both the 7K2000 and 7K1000.C Hitachi Deskstar drives feature industry-standard 512-byte sector formatting and a ramp load/unload design to increase shock protection.

The new 7K1000.C is expected to deliver power efficiency at 4.4 watts or less idle power. The 7K1000.C family will be available this quarter.

Prices for the new drives were not included as part of Hitachi's announcement.