Various reports point to a new 7200 RPM, 3.5-inch HDD that Hitachi recently added to its roster. Called the Deskstar 7K3000, the drive features 5 platters and a meaty 3 TB of storage. It also follows Hitachi's previous 7200 RPM entry in the market which offered a slightly smaller 2 TB capacity.
According to the company, the 7K3000 is the first Hitachi hard drive with a 6 Gb/s SATA interface. It also features a 64 MB cache buffer, an eco-friendly, Halogen-free design, and an idle power draw of 6.8W.
"The Deskstar 7K3000 is designed to allow manufacturers to leverage the benefits of the latest components and operating systems to deliver high-performance, high-capacity, power-efficient systems," Hitachi said.
The company also points consumers here, explaining that they can't simply shove a 3 TB drive into any rig.
"A data drive greater than or equal to 2.2 TB requires an operating system that supports long LBA addressing, such as Windows 7, a GUID partition table (GPT) and HDD drivers that support 2.2 TB drives," Hitachi states. "In addition to the requirements for a data drive, a Windows boot drive requires an EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) BIOS and a 64-bit version of Windows Vista or Windows 7. Linux does not require an EFI BIOS."
Currently there's no pricing or a release date, however it's speculated that the drive will cost around $320 USD. Hitachi also offers a 1.5 TB and 2 TB model.
