Hitachi has, as expected, announced its first 2TB harddrive. Deskstar 7K2000 is a regular 3.5″ harddrive with five big storage platters offering a total capacity of 2TB. Western Digital that also sells 2TB harddrives use only four platters, as it has managed to reach higher data densities. It’s not the only difference between Hitachi’s 2TB drive and competing drives.
Both WD and Seagate have been offering 2TB models for some time, but have both chosen to use slower engines, Seagate specifies its Barracuda LP 2TB model to operate with an RPM of 5,900 RPM. WD has no specific number says it’s between 5400 and 7200 RPM.
“With the introduction of the industry’s first 7200 RPM, 2TB HDD, Hitachi GST is building a tradition of time-to-market leadership for delivering the biggest and fastest disk drives for capacity-hungry PC users, given it was also the first HDD vendor to ship a 1TB HDD, the Deskstar 7K1000, in early 2007.”
Hitachi most likely offers the fastest 2TB harddrive on the market, even if we of course need tests to confirm this, although this does raise some questions regarding the heat and noise coming from the drive. Hitachi says that the typical noise is 29dB.
