Hitachi Offering One-Terabyte Hard Drive

The Deskstar 7K1000 is best suited for home gaming and media center PCs, as well as external storage for digital entertainment.

Hitachi on Wednesday said it has begun shipping to retailers a one-terabyte hard drive for PCs.

The Deskstar 7K1000, introduced in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, has just recently become available through retailers. CDW is among the first companies to offer the new product.

The Deskstar, which has a retail price of $399, is best suited for gaming and media center PCs and external storage devices. The hard drive features a 3 Gbytes-per-second Serial-ATA interface and a 32-Mbyte data buffer.

Driving the demand for bigger hard drives is the growing use of PCs in the home for storing and managing digital content, such as photos, music, and video. "Consumers' desire to create and share digital entertainment is the primary accelerator for capacity and performance increases in desktop PC hard drives," Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing officer for Hitachi, said in a statement.

The Deskstar has a maximum media data rate of 1,070 Mbytes per second, runs at 7,200 RPMs, and weights 1.5 pounds. To help ensure data integrity, the drive features a ramp load and unload design to increase shock protection, and thermal fly-height control (TFC) to maintain a consistent fly-height during the read/write process.

Key Features

Size: 3.5 inches

Capacities: 1 TB

750 GB

Speed: 7,200 RPM

Interfaces: SATA 3.0 GB/s

Seek Time: 8.5 ms read

9.2 ms write

Legacy Drives: Hitachi

IBM