1T hard drive debuts at CeBIT

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 01 May 2007 12:39

Business IT - Technology

Hitachi's one-terabyte 3.5in hard drive, the DeskStar 7K1000, made its local debut at CeBIT Australia today in an ASI PC.

The five-platter, 7200rpm SATA 7K1000 is suited to high-performance, gaming and media center PCs and external storage devices, according to Hitachi officials.

Adam Waye, Hitachi product manager at distributor Legend Performance Technology, said "This is an exciting day for Legend and our partners, and we are very pleased to help deliver this ground breaking technology to consumers.

"The industry's first one-terabyte hard drive represents a milestone that is 50 years in the making, and it reasserts Hitachi's leadership as the highest-capacity, lowest-cost storage technology."

Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing officer at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies said "Delivering the one-terabyte hard drive this year is a monumental achievement not only for Hitachi and the hard drive industry, but also for the end user. Consumers' desire to create and share digital entertainment is the primary accelerator for capacity and performance increases in desktop PC hard drives."

Although the $A599/$US399 drive began shipping to some markets in March, local deliveries aren't expected until "the latter part of this quarter", Legend officials warned.

A second version of the drive optimised for digital video recorder applications has also been announced by Hitachi. The CinemaStar 7K1000 features firmware optimised for video streaming, virtually silent operation even during seeks, and reduced power consumption for cooler operation.

It also offers host-drive authentication, a feature that can be used to prevent the drive being installed in a different device. For example, this could prevent the drive from a set-top box from working in a PC.

The local price of the CinemaStar will be announced closer to its local availability.