Hitachi Starts Shipping 1TB-Platter Hard Drives

It was bound to happen, but it probably came to the fore earlier than most storage industry experts expected. The first single-platter hard disk drive for high-performance desktop PCs with a full terabyte of capacity is now shipping as of Sept. 6, courtesy of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.
Hitachi’s 3.5-inch Deskstar 7K1000.D drive is now being supplied for use in its own new 1TB Deskstar and CinemaStar product lines. Hitachi also will OEM these to other drive makers via its channel partners, said Brendan Collins, Hitachi GST’s vice president of product marketing.
The drives come in a range of capacities, from 250GB up to 1TB, and they run on either low-RPM CoolSpin or 7,200 RPM platforms.
Hitachi claims that it was the first to ship a multi-disk 1TB hard disk drive (HDD) in 2007; Seagate, Western Digital, Iomega, Toshiba and Buffalo all came out about the same time with their own.
Deskstar 7K1000.D hard drives are aimed at external storage, PC gaming systems, and desktop RAID arrays. Using Hitachi’s fast 7,200 RPM platform, the drive has a 6Gb/second Serial ATA interface and a 32MB cache buffer, Collins said.
All 1TB/platter 7,200 RPM and Coolspin versions ship with a 32MB cache buffer and a 6Gb/second Serial ATA interface, Collins said.
Deskstar 7K1000.D has eighth-generation Hitachi power management and power-saving HiVERT, which provides up to 15 percent idle power savings over the previous Hitachi model. The low power profile of both the Deskstar 7K1000.D and the Deskstar 5K1000.B drives helps reduce overall system power requirements for developing energy-efficient systems, Collins said.