Hitachi Takes Lead in Storage Capacity

January 8th, 2007: As solid state disks hit the streets, Hitachi has rolled out a landmark 1TB magnetic hard drive.

A first for the industry capacity-wise, Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K1000 and CinemaStar 1TB drives have been designed predominately for storage-hungry consumers, however, with almost 250 hours of HD video storage capacity, digital video recording (DVR) applications have also been focused on.

“The industry's first one-terabyte hard drive represents a milestone that is 50 years in the making, and it reasserts the hard drive's leadership as the highest-capacity, lowest-cost storage technology,” said Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing officer, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

The 3.5-inch, 7200 RPM Parallel-ATA/Serial-ATA hard drives utilise perpendicular magnetic recording technology and features ramp load design for increased shock protection, three low-power idle modes and adaptive error recovery and SMART command transport.

Hitachi expects the Deskstar to begin shipping in the first quarter of 2007 with a suggested retail price of US$399, or 40 cents per gigabyte. An enterprise version of the TB drive designed for lower duty-cycle, high-capacity enterprise environments is currently under evaluation and is expected to be available in the second quarter of 2007.

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