Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi) has announced its one terabyte hard drive, the Deskstar 7K1000.B. As the amount of digital information created, captured and duplicated around the world continues to grow at an uninterrupted pace, Hitachi's vision is that three elements – rich media content, culture, and increasing capacity – are uniting to create an entirely new landscape for enterprise and consumer data storage. It is against this backdrop that Hitachi is announcing the Deskstar 7K1000.B, an energy-efficient 7,200 RPM one terabyte (1TB) hard drive.

The Deskstar 7K1000.B provides a good blend of power efficiency and performance, making it an ideal solution for consumer and commercial PCs. The new three-disk design improves idle power consumption up to 43 percent over its 1TB predecessor. Increased protection against data loss and piracy is provided via Bulk Data Encryption (BDE), which is available as an optional feature to users. Hitachi is also shipping the Deskstar E7K1000, designed to provide high-capacity storage for low-duty-cycle, 24x7 applications.

The new 7,200 RPM, 3.5-inch drives are available in a range of capacities from 160GB to 1TB. The drives are built using Hitachi's perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) heads and disks, delivering a maximum of 375GB of storage per disk with a high level of reliability.

"We are pleased to see how the market for high capacity desktop and laptop drives has grown substantially in the past year," said Larry Swezey, director, Consumer and Commercial HDD Marketing and Strategy, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "Now through the application of Hitachi's advanced head, media and channel technologies, we can bring to the market a terabyte drive using only three disks that has advanced performance and power consumption efficiencies. This will allow us to take the next step in making terabyte technology available and affordable in the personal storage, consumer electronics, desktop and enterprise segments."

Power Efficiency

By applying Hitachi's power management technology and innovations introduced in the 2.5-inch Travelstar line of mobile hard drives, the Deskstar 7K1000.B delivers efficient power management and thermal emissions to help manufacturers meet energy compliance targets.

Data Protection

The Deskstar 7K1000.B also features optional Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) for hard drive-level data security. Previously, data on a hard drive could be protected either through software-based encryption or a system-level password. However, hard drive-level encryption provides a higher level of security than any of the above options.

When employing bulk data encryption, data is scrambled using a key as it is being written to the disk and then descrambled with the key as it is retrieved. Thus, data encryption at the hard-drive level
represents a more advanced approach of securing users' data and is generally considered to be impenetrable.

Performance For The Enterprise

With the Deskstar 7K1000.B, Hitachi also announced the Deskstar E7K1000, a drive designed for business critical storage systems. The drives ship with a 32MB buffer, five-year warranty, 1.2 million hour Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology. The Deskstar E7K1000 has the same low power characteristics and optional encryption technology as its desktop-class counterpart, but has been specifically designed for use in nearline storage for deep data archival and other high-density storage environments.