Hitachi has launched what it refers to as the second generation of terabyte drives. Hitachi was the first to reach the market with a one terabyte drive, but it did it by using five 200GB platters. The competition did it by combining four 250GB platters, or three 333GB platters. Hitachi’s latest 1TB model use an all new 375GB platter, along with hardware encryption support and promises of new levels of performance and power savings.
Hitachi hasn’t just a new flagship model, it has in fact launched three 1B harddrives, but models ranging from 160GB and up, all using the latest technology. It has also unveiled a series of workstation drives, led by the Deskstar E7K1000. These are designed for more critical business systems with a higher requirement for reliability, performance and power. They also have a larger 32MB buffer, five-year warranty, 1.2 million MTBF (hour Mean Time Between Failure) and Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) for unaffected performance in multi-drive environments.
“Hitachi pioneered the industry’s first terabyte hard drive, so we are pleased to see how the market for high capacity desktop and laptop drives has grown substantially in the past year,” said Larry Swezey, director, Consumer and Commercial HDD Marketing and Strategy, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. “Now through the application of Hitachi’s advanced head, media and channel technologies, we can bring to market a terabyte drive using only three disks that has advanced performance and best-in-class power consumption. This will allow us to take the next step in making terabyte technology available and affordable in the personal storage, consumer electronics, desktop and enterprise segments.”
Deskstar 7K1000.B is the name of the new desktop flagship. Compared to previous generation drives, this new harddrive is suppose to deliver even better performance while consuming less power. It also features Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) for hard drive-level data security, which should be faster and safer than equivalent software solutions. From the press release;
“When employing bulk data encryption, data is scrambled using a key as it is being written to the disk and then descrambled with the key as it is retrieved. Thus, data encryption at the hard-drive level represents a more sophisticated approach of securing users’ data and is generally considered to be virtually impenetrable. The Deskstar 7K1000.B uses an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) that has been certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to deliver the strongest commercially available data security protection. Only hard drives that have received this certification are eligible to be used by the U.S. government for national security applications.”
All drives of course use the SATA interface and support NCQ (Native Command Queuing). The 1TB models will start shipping to customers in July with a worldwide availability.
