Hitachi Quietly Joins 3TB Hard Drive Club

From X-bit Labs: Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has quietly started to sell its first internal 3TB hard disk drives (HDDs). The new Deskstar 5K3000 and Deskstar 7K3000 products feature five platters and only work on newer computers, thus, they are unlikely to become very popular among end-users in the next several months. Still, the intrigue is that Hitachi's 3TB drive is the first 3TB HDD to feature 7200rpm spindle speed

Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 and 7K3000 hard drives in 3.5" form-factor come in 1.5TB, 2TB and 3TB capacities, 32MB and 64MB data buffer (respectively for 5K and 7K drives) and support Serial ATA-600 interface. The highest-capacity drive utilizes five platters with 411Gb/s capacity per square inch. The 5K3000-series features 5400rpm spindle speed and has 170.7MB/s media transfer rate. The 7K3000-series sports 7200rpm motor and has 207MB/s media transfer rate along with higher power consumption. Unfortunately, Hitachi dies not share any other performance-related specs of its novelties.

The new Deskstar 5K3000 drives are less advanced compared to competing offerings from Western Digital that use four platters to achieve 3GB capacities and thus consume lower amount of power and have higher performance. Nonetheless, the 7K3000 drive is the world's only 3TB HDD with 7200rpm spindle speed and that should probably mean that it is also the world's fastest 3TB hard drive.

Recently Hitachi initiated sales of the 3TB Deskstar 7K3000 drives in the U.S. and Japan. According to Froogle, the price of one 3TB drive from Hitachi starts at $249.

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