Hitachi quietly adds 3TB Deskstar 7K300, 5K300 hard drives

[Matthew DeCarlo]

With nary a word to the masses, Hitachi has posted product pages for its first 3TB hard drives. The Deskstar 7K3000 and 5K3000 come in 1.5TB, 2TB and 3TB flavors -- the largest of which has a five 600GB platter design, as opposed to the four 750GB disk solution used by Western Digital's Caviar Green. Besides WD, Seagate also beat Hitachi to the 3TB milestone, announcing its 3TB FreeAgent GoFlex external storage drive back in June (which also packs five 600GB platters), but Seagate hasn't shipped a 3TB internal desktop offering yet.

Hitachi tries to differentiate itself by outfitting its drives with 6Gb/s SATA -- even if they can't utilize the extra headroom. As designated by the model numbers, Hitachi's 7K3000 spins at a speedy 7200RPM, while the 5K3000 has a slower, more energy efficient 5400RPM rotation. The 7K3000 is supposedly 27% faster than previous-generation products in PCMark Vantage testing scores, and improves idle power draw by 30%. Meanwhile, the 5K3000 boosts power savings by another 29% over the 7K3000, according to Hitachi's spec sheet.

Hitachi hasn't greeted the drives with a proper announcement yet, so we're not sure about pricing and availability. That said, it's worth noting that the new drives don't appear to come with a host bus adapter like the 3TB Caviar Green, so only a handful of machines will fully support them. To use a 3TB HDD for storage you need a 64-bit OS and an OS that supports GPT partitions, while a UEFI motherboard is required to create boot partitions larger than 2.19TB. If you're a little confused, Hitachi offers an explanation and a handy compatibility chart.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/41148-hitachi-quietly-adds-3tb-deskstar-7k300-5k300-hard-drives.html

 

[Nima304]

Three competitors? 3TB hard drives? This is awesome.

 

[IAMTHESTIG]

Good good... I hope they delay was to perfect their product. I have 16 of their 1TB 7200RPM drives for a few years now and i've not had a single problem with them. A buddy of mine has the same setup as well for his personal media file server and again, no problems. For comparrison, i'm running 20 Seagate 1TB 720 RPM drives in 5 of my DVR servers at work, and have had about 4 drive failures in the last two years. So needless to say I think Hitachi wins a reliability star here.

I can only hope these 3TB's are as reliable as their 1's are. I plan on replacing all my 1TB drives with bigger ones within the next 6 months.

 

[Adhmuz]

"Besides WD, Seagate also beat Hitachi to the 3TB milestone, announcing its 3TB My Book Essential external storage drive back in June"

The My Book is a Western Digital brand, you mean the Seagate Expansion maybe? Other than the typo I don't have much to say, waiting for SSD technology to surpass HDD size and then things will become interesting.

 

[Matthew DeCarlo]

Oops, I meant the FreeAgent GoFlex. Thanks for that Adhmuz.

 

[fpsgamerJR62]

3-Terabyte drives would be nice for data storage and backup. I don't think that many users are looking forward to booting from 3TB drives if and when motherboard manufacturers finally get around to using UEFI instead of BIOS. Boot drives are pretty much going in the direction of SSDs, more so if SSD prices continue to drop and drive capacities continue to increase. As for me, I'm sticking with 2TB WD Caviar Black HDs until I can afford an SSD.

 

[TeamworkGuy2]

Another 3TB, that's cool, although since I don't store music, movies, pictures, or anything else of major size on my computer, I wouldn't have any clue what to do with a 3TB HD... LOL

Adhmuz said:
... waiting for SSD technology to surpass HDD size and then things will become interesting.

Wow, that will quite interesting. Headline: "First ever 512 TB drive is a OCZ SSD" I CAN wait to see the price of one of those.

 

[gwailo247]

I remember when I got my first 1 TB drive..."I'll never fill this up".

 

[madboyv1]

gwailo247 said:
I remember when I got my first 1 TB drive..."I'll never fill this up".

I remember when I got my first 1 TB drive... "Crap, this isn't going to last very long". =p

Adhmuz said:
waiting for SSD technology to surpass HDD size and then things will become interesting.

Except they can do that already. It is only a matter of packing more memory chips onto the PCB and integrating additional controllers, though it would likely interface through a PCIe Slot because of the larger physical form factor. T

 

[Johny47]

Why 'silently'? that's a nice piece of kit as they say, I don't think I would ever use that much storage unless I get a better connection in the future but nice.