Hitachi Fires Up Second-generation Terabyte Hard Drives

Tag : Flash Disk USB 2 0

San Jose (CA) - Hitachi updated its 3.5 inch hard drive family andnow offers the second-generation 1TB drive, which does not offermore capacity or speed, but comes with effective power savingfeatures that may allow storage farms to run these 3.5 inch drivesat 2.5 inch power consumption rates.

On the surface, there is not much new about Hitachis new 3.5"7K1000.B drive. In fact, the main difference to spot right away isthe fact that the storage density has been increased substantiallyand Hitachi GST has joined the leading 3.5 inch vendors: Instead offive 200 GB disks, the new drive has three 333 GB disks. Hitachirepresentatives told us that the 5-disk model will continue to beavailable through 2009, but the 3-disk version will ramp quicklyand replace the old drives.
What makes the new 7200 rpm drive interesting is not itsperformance or capacity (which theoretically could hit 1.6 TB in5-disk models), but its power consumption.
Compared to the 8.4 watts the first-gen drive consumed inidle-mode, the B-model checks in at only 5.2 watts. And if powerconsumption is the primary concern of the user (such as datastorage facilities), the drive supports a "reduced power idlestate": The disk rotation speed can be dropped via HDD commands toless than 5000 rpm, which will take the idle power consumption downto 2.4 watts which is close to 2.5 inch territory (about 2 - 2.2watts) and could make these drives an interesting option for anyenvironment that does not depend on maximum data transfer rates.
The price of the terabyte drive is substantially lower as well thanwhat we paid last year. Hitachi said that the 7K1000.B is nowoffered at $239.99 MSRP, which means that you should expect streetprices not too far away from the $200 mark. The price is about inline with the competition: Samsungs 1 TB drive, for example, iscurrently sold in a price range of $159 to $265, according toPricegrabber.com.
Hitachi also offers an enterprise version of the 7K1000.B. For anextra $40, the E7K1000 comes with a larger (32 MB) buffer a higherreliability rating 1.2 million hour MTBF (there is no MTBF ratingon the 7K1000.B) as well as a 5-year warranty instead of the 3-yearwarranty on the 7K1000.B.