Hitachi Ships 3 Drives, 3 TB Each

By Kevin Parrish
published

Hitachi is shipping internal and external 3 TB hard drives, one of which comes with a consumer-oriented kit for legacy setups.

Tuesday Hitachi announced that it launched a "trio" of hard drive solutions featuring 3 TB of storage each: the 3 GB Hitachi Deskstar Internal Hard Drive Kit featuring a 7200 RPM Deskstar 7K3000 hard drive, the 3 TB Hitachi XL USB 2.0 external drive, and the 3 TB model for Hitachi's Deskstar 7K3000 and 5K3000 OEM-based series.

Shipping this week to online and retail outlets for $249.99, the 3 TB Hitachi Deskstar Internal Hard Drive Kit features the said 3 TB 7K3000 HDD with mounting screws, step-by-step instructions, and downloadable software that allows 32- and 64-bit Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems to use the 3 TB HDD as one big massive data drive-- no additional hardware is needed.

"Consumers who have 32- or 64-bit Apple Mac OS X or Linux systems can enjoy the drive as a data drive or a boot drive right out of the box--no software download is required," the company said. "Due to the 2.2 TB limit on certain systems, Windows Vista and Windows 7 users should consult Hitachi’s 2.2 TB web site for system compatibility guidelines to use the drive as a boot drive."

Hitachi's external storage solution, the XL Desktop External Drive, is USB 2.0-based and compatible with Mac and PC. The drive is actually available now in three capacities: 1 TB for $99.99, 2 TB for $169.99 and 3 TB for $249.99.

As for the OEM drives, Hitachi's Deskstar 7K3000 began shipping in November and now arrives in three flavors: 3 TB, 2 TB and 1.5 TB. This particular line is best suited for heavy users, primed and ready for video RAID arrays, home or business PCs, high-performance workstations and gaming systems.

"All Deskstar 7K3000 drives deliver excellent power efficiency and reduced thermal emissions," the company said. "The Deskstar 7K3000 drive is also one of the fastest and most energy-efficient 7,200 RPM drives on the market. When compared to previous generation Deskstar drives, the 7K3000 PCMark Vantage test scores show up to a 27 percent performance improvement, and an idle power savings of up at least nine percent."

Hitachi's Deskstar 5K3000 family isn't quite as performance-driven, focusing instead on delivering low power and quieter operation for environmentally-friendly computers-- 29-percent lower power and 14-percent quieter acoustics than the 7K3000 line. Hitachi said that the 1.5 TB and 2 TB versions are shipping this month, followed by the 3 TB version slated to arrive sometime in Q1 2011.

Kevin Parrish
17 Comments Comment from the forums
  • agnickolov
    Keep them coming! A bit pricey to start, but it'll drop to reasonable levels soon enough...
    Reply
  • shloader
    No mention of platter count? Reason I ask is whether Hitachi is first (1TB race) or catching up they often pack their first offerings of max capacity with about five platters @ 7200RPM. I will say the positive aspect of them joining the 3TB crowd is they put on pressure resulting in competitive pricing. No come on Samsung.
    Reply
  • dalauder
    Good point with platter count. Maximizing areal density with fewer platters results in a faster drive--but more importantly with a 3TB drive, fewer platters reduces chance of failure. Think if each platter has a 5% failure rate, your chance of failure increases dramatically with each additional platter. I too am waiting to see what Samsung brings to the table.
    Reply
  • bhtechmech
    nice but i'll stick to RAID and waiting for SSD to get bigger. Too long to recover when they fail and defrag when there that bigg.
    Reply
  • eddieroolz
    3TB...! @_@
    Reply
  • mavroxur
    3TB is a lot of data to be trusting to a Hitachi drive.... >_>
    Reply
  • The people writing these articles are absolutely horrible at details, spelling, grammar and punctuation. Unbelievable!
    Reply
  • aevm
    External 3 TB drives for $249.99, with USB 2.0? No, thanks. I'd rather spend $180 for a WDBACW0030HBK-NESN - same thing from WD but several times faster thanks to USB 3.0.

    Reply
  • archange
    bhtechmechnice but i'll stick to RAID and waiting for SSD to get bigger. Too long to recover when they fail and defrag when there that bigg.
    Hmm. Based on my usage patterns, what mostly needs defragmenting is the system drive alone.

    My system partitions are always limited to below 100 GB and so, defragging takes little time. True, I've been using striping for my main PC builds since 2004, which helps a bit and also, I forgo using a page file altogether. When I had less memory, I used a fixed size page file, to avoid unnecessary fragmentation.

    All my games go to D:\Games and based on what I've seen, they never fragment. As for torrenting, having a cache of at least 256 MB set in your client goes a long way to preventing fragmentation. Besides, if you're so worried, you can provide a separate partition or even a drive for that purpose.

    Which leaves mostly media files to be stored on a 3 TB drive. Now don't tell me these cause fragmentation, cause I don't buy it. Besides, even huge partitions containing media files are easily defragged, due to the files being large and cohesive.

    My next build will most certainly include at least an SSD for the system drive and I will probably keep my mechanical Samsung F1s in Raid 0 for whatever else (read video editing).

    My home server, however, would most definitely benefit from using 3 TB drives in a new array :)
    Reply
  • dalauder
    I'm still stuck on how awesome Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB's are. I have 3, short stroked in RAID 0 for a 300GB system drive (RAID 5 on the rest) and I get 425MB/s across the entire drive in HD Tach and over 2GB/s burst. But 3TB drives should be quite a bit faster than this. I might have to RAID a couple when the prices drop.
    Reply