Conclusion
It was only a matter of time before a hard drive maker jumped over the mark of one terabyte. It was Seagate who first introduced a 1 GB drive in the early 90s, and offered more than 500 GB with the dethroned 750 GB Barracuda 7200.10 last year, but Hitachi is the first to bring a 1 TB hard disk to market. Congratulations! This new capacity point will help increase storage densities in desktop PCs and entry-level enterprise applications. Hitachi is also ready for the consumer market, because the company also offers a Cinemastar at the same 750 GB and 1,000 GB capacity points.
From a cost per gigabyte perspective, purchasing a Deskstar 7K1000 for an estimated price tag of $375 does not make a lot of sense. There are many 500 GB hard drives available in the area of $120-150, and two of these will give you the same capacity at 2/3 to 3/4 of the cost. Still, a whopping 1,000 GB on a single partition is easier to handle, and I'd generally prefer a single huge hard drive over other solutions, unless what you're looking for is a RAID setup.
Hitachi's new Deskstar 7K1000 is clearly worth recommending for those with huge storage requirements. Its 1 TB represents a 33% increase over Seagate's 750 GB, which is substantial, and it even outperforms the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10. However, it is not the perfect hard drive at all. Performance users should still go for a WD Raptor drive at 10,000 RPM to host the operating system, and add a second 7,200 RPM for storage. In such a case, the 7K1000 is awesome, but it also gets noticeably hotter than other 7,200 RPM drives, so it should be properly cooled for the sake of data safety.
Seagate's 1 TB drive is on the horizon as well, and it will be based on a four platter design with 250+ GB data density per platter - and it should carry Seagate's five year manufacturer warranty, which we'd love to see for the 7K1000 as well. In the end, 1 TB storage capacity should suffice for some time...
