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Hitachi Unveils World's First 2TB 7200RPM Hard Drive

Paul Lilly — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:45:02 -0500

Hitachi can't lay claim as the first manufacturer to develop a 2TB hard drive -- that distinction belongs to Western Digital -- but it is the first one to do so with a 7200RPM spindle speed, besting the spindle speeds found on 2TB drives from both WD and Seagate.

"The new Deskstar 7K2000 reflects our ongoing commitment to provide customer, channel partners, and OEMs with proven, reliable solutions for enabling desktop computers, gaming systems, workstations, and desktop RAID arrays," said Brendan Collins, vice president of marketing, Hitachi GST.

Hitachi's fourth generation Deskstar crams 2TB onto a five-platter design "with relaxed bit density" and perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology. As would be expected in a modern, high performance drive, the 7K2000 boasts 32MB of cache and a 3Gb/s SATA interface.

No word yet on price or availability.

Image Credit: Hitachi

Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 Hard Drive

David Murphy — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:02:40 -0500

Holy hell, man. We have been waiting for this day for a long time, and Hitachi is the first hard-drive manufacturer out of the gate to meet our terabyte-size storage needs. Yes, that’s right. A terabyte. One thousand gigabytes stuffed into a hard drive, or in this case, a Deskstar.

For those keeping score at home, that’s 250GB more than the current storage leader, Seagate’s 750GB Barracuda drive. And while the differences aren’t quite as dramatic in terms of speed, Hitachi’s 7K1000 storage monster still beats out the Seagate in our HD Tach benchmarks.

The Deskstar 7K1000 drive sports five platters with 200GB of storage apiece, which doesn’t give the device an amazing areal density, especially compared to its smaller peers. In theory, drives with a higher areal density perform better, but not so when it comes to the 7K1000. We recorded a whopping 72.7MB/s for the drive’s average read test, which curb-stomps the Seagate’s now-paltry 66MB/s. While Western Digital’s Raptor drive tops that score with a random access speed of 77.9MB/s, it’s also less than one-sixth the capacity of the 7K1000.

Looking at random access times—a measure of a hard drive’s ability to pull information from a variety of different spots on the disks—Hitachi’s terabyte drive again tops the Barracuda, by only 0.3 of a millisecond, but a difference nonetheless. As one might expect, the Raptor drive retains its speed-king position. You’d merely need to RAID seven of them together to get the capacity of the 7K1000.

In a comparison of apples and oranges—the Raptor’s speed versus the Barracuda’s size—Hitachi’s terabyte drive is nothing short of a watermelon. It’s the fastest of all the drives in its class, of which there is one, and even tops the drives that hover around the meager 500GB mark. Toss in the terabyte of storage, and you get an absolute winner.

Hitachi Deskstar T7K500

David Murphy — Mon, 07 May 2007 16:11:26 -0500

We’ll get the bad news out of the way first. Hitachi’s Deskstar T7K500 hard drive, with an easy-to-remember 500GB of storage, is unremarkable. More than that, it underperforms when compared to similarly featured, similarly priced (if not cheaper!) products.

Although the Deskstar’s speedy random access time of 13.2ms is faster than times posted by all of the similarly outfitted 500GB models we’ve looked at, that’s all this drive has going for it. The Deskstar’s average read time, which is a pretty good reflection of a drive’s performance across the entirety of the disc, taps out at an average of 64.2MB/s.

When compared against the sea of drives that sit in our Lab, the Deskstar’s average read speed is barely better than the Seagate 400GB Barracuda 7200.8’s—a PATA drive, mind you. And SATA models from both Samsung and Western Digital (which have feature sets that are nearly identical to the Deskstar’s) utterly destroy the Hitachi in our benchmarks, as both push read speeds upward of 70MB/s.

These results were slightly curious to us, as the Deskstar sports three platters of approximately 166GB apiece. That gives it quite a boost in areal density when compared to the Western Digital Caviar’s measly four-platter 125GB setup. As we’ve seen in the past, drives with juicer areal densities tend to run faster. But not in the Deskstar’s case!

So, what then is the good news? If Hitachi’s new terabyte drive helps lower the price of the company’s smaller models, the cost-to-benefit ratio of the T7K500 could, in the future, make it a nice solution. That’s about the only silver lining we see.