Hitachi ships first 2TB 7200rpm hard drive
Shane McGlaun10 August 2009, 11:21 PM
Despite huge storage capacity and 7200rpm speed, the new drive offers power savings as well.
One of the things that a computer user will never complain about having too much of is storage. Notebook hard drives only
recently hit the 1TB capacity, but 1TB hard drives are nothing new for desktop users.
What is new for desktop users is the 2TB hard drive that Hitachi announced today. The drive is the D
eskstar 7K2000 and is the first drive in the industry to hit 2TB at 7200 rpm. The drive uses five platters and takes advantage of perpendicular magnetic recording to reach the capacity. Hitachi does make 500GB platters, so I am not sure why it opted to not reach 2TB with only four platters.
The huge storage capacity and 7200 rpm speed doesn’t mean the drive can’t be energy efficient. Hitachi claims that the new 2TB drive offers a 10% reduction in idle power consumption compared to previous generation drives (this may be a clue about why there are five platters rather than four). The Deskstar 7K2000 also features a 32MB cache and uses the 3Gb/s SATA interface. Hitachi was mum on details like pricing and estimated ship date -- though it says the hard drives are "now shipping". In hard drive industry parlance, though, that could mean Hitachi has shipped a few nominal sample drives to someone and it will be months until the drives are actually readily available at retail.