Psst, Come Closer -- Hitachi Quietly Releases 3TB Hard Drive

Posted 11/17/2010 at 8:36am | by Paul Lilly

3

Comments

Print

There weren't any trumpets or ballyhooing of any kind to celebrate the launch of Hitachi's 3TB Deskstar 7K3000 hard drive, just a product page update if you happened to stumble across it.

"The Deskstar 7K3000 is Hitachi's first hard drive to deliver an enormous three terabytes of storage capacity and 7200RPM performance in a standard 3.5-inch form factor," Hitachi says. "The 7K3000 is also the first Hitachi hard drive with a 6Gb/s SATA interface, which along with its 64MB cache buffer delivers a big boost to performance over the previous generation product."

Sounds like something we'd expect Hitachi to shout from a mountain top rather than quietly unveil as they've done. Regardless, Hitachi's new 3TB drive crams all that storage capacity onto five 600GB platters. Combined with the cache and SATA 6Gb/s interface, Hitachi says you can expect up to 27 percent better performance compared to previous generation products in PCMark Vantage.

It's likely Hitachi will formerly announce the new drive in the coming days or weeks, giving the company time to figure out how best to inform users of the 2.2TB barrier. Drives larger than 2.2TB require a number of technologies to coexist if you plan on using them as a boot drive, including a motherboard with a UEFI BIOS and a 64-bit version of Windows Vista or Windows 7. And unlike Western Digital's 3TB Caviar Green drive, Hitachi's 7K3000 doesn't ship with an AHCI-compliant host bust adapter (HBA) to provide an end-around for non-UEFI equipped motherboards.

Deskstar 7K3000 Datasheet (PDF)
Hitachi's High Capacity Hard Drives Tech Brief (PDF)

Image Credit: Hitachi