Hitachi introduces second generation 1TB Drive

Hitachi was first to announce 1TB hard drive in January 2007. Now they announced second generation 1TB drive Deskstar 7K1000.B which used 43% less power than first generation. The 7K1000.B also offers users the option of bulk data encryption (BDE) for the entire contents of the drive.

Instead of five 200 GB disks, the new drive has three 333 GB disks. Hitachi representatives told us that the 5-disk model will continue to be available through 2009, but the 3-disk version will ramp quickly and replace the old drives. What makes the new 7200 rpm drive interesting is not its performance or capacity, but its power consumption.
The 7K1000.B makes use of perpendicular magnetic recording and the drive’s BDE option uses AES encryption certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to deliver the strongest commercially available levels of security for data.

Power requirement for the 7K1000.B is 5.2W at idle and the drive uses a 16MB cache. And if power consumption is the primary concern of the user (such as data storage facilities), the drive supports a “reduced power idle state”: The disk rotation speed can be dropped via HDD commands to less than 5000 rpm, which will take the idle power consumption down to 2.4 watts That is close to 2.5” territory (about 2 – 2.2 watts) and could make these drives an interesting option for any environment that does not depend on maximum data transfer rates. The drive has a maximum media transfer rate of 1388 Mbits/s. For enterprise users needing a high mean time between failure (MTBF), a DeskstarE7K1000 drive is also being introduced that has up to a 32MB buffer and a 1.2 million hour MTBF featuring the same low power requirements and optional encryption technology.