Hitachi Terabyte Hard Drives

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies showed the first terabyte (TB) hard drive. Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 will begin shipping to retail customers in the first quarter of 2007 at a suggested retail price of $399 (USD), or 40 cents per gigabyte (GB). This new consumer-friendly price makes ultra-high storage capacity more affordable and accessible than ever before. Along with the Deskstar 7K1000 for the retail market, Hitachi is also announcing today a CinemaStar version 1TB hard drive, which provides optimized capabilities specifically designed for digital video recording (DVR) applications. The 3.5-inch, 7200 RPM Parallel-ATA/Serial-ATA hard drives are built on the industry's most reliable perpendicular magnetic recording technology, first established with Hitachi's Travelstar 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch product lines.

Hitachi is focused on maximizing the value of the hard drive by spearheading the era of the "smart" hard drive. Customized features have been incorporated into Hitachi's hard drives, tailoring them for the application-set that they serve. To that end, Hitachi's 1TB hard drives are targeted to two distinct application areas.

• Deskstar 7K1000 - gaming and high-performance PCs, external storage devices and upgrade applications
• SATA 3.0Gb/s and PATA-133 interfaces
• Ramp load design for increased shock protection
• Three low-power idle modes to boost power efficiency
• CinemaStar 7K1000 - DVR applications
• Adaptive error recovery and SMART command transport for optimized video streaming and picture quality
• Smooth Stream Technology to optimize the drive for audio/video applications requiring reliable storage
• "Bedroom quiet" acoustics

Finally, an enterprise version of the TB drive designed for lower duty-cycle, high-capacity enterprise environments is currently under evaluation at major OEM customers and is expected to be available in the second quarter.

The Deskstar 7K1000 SATA version will be available in Q1 2007 at 750-GB and one-TB capacities. The 1TB capacity point will have a suggested retail price of $399 (USD). The CinemaStar 1TB hard drive will be available in the second quarter.

Technical Specifications:
Deskstar 7K1000
1000/750 GB - SATA (GB = 1 billion bytes, accessible capacity may be less)
148 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
1070 Mb/s max. media data rate
8.7 ms average seek time (with command overhead)
7,200 RPM, 4.17 ms average latency
Serial-ATA 3.0Gb/s
32 MB data buffer - SATA
26.1 mm in height (max)
700g in weight (max)
5/4 platters, 10/8 recording heads - SATA
300 G/1 ms pulse non-operating shock
9.0 (5 disk)/8.1 (4 disk) watt idle power - SATA
2.9 Bels typical idle acoustics
5-60 degrees C operating temperature

CinemaStar
Specifications will be available at the time of product shipment.

For more information, please visit the company's Web site at http://www.hitachigst.com .