Hitachi has announced the five-platter-packing 2TB Deskstar 7K2000 hard disk drive. With a rotational speed of 7200RPM, it\'s the industry\'s first among desktop HDDs. Its specs include a 32MB cache and SATA II interface. In addition to their new 2TB drive, Hitachi is also refreshing its high-volume desktop HDD family. The new 7200RPM Deskstar 7K1000.C family will house up to a capacious 500GB per platter, and will be available in sizes from 160GB to 1TB.

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Actually, our Tandberg data storage server has 16 bays filled with 1TB and we need more, so with these new drives our problem will be resolved. Looking forward to get the pricing to budget it for the next quarter.

I'm pretty sure Matthew wasn't writing about Enterprise level solutions. However, as consumers go, I will soon be in the market for something over a TB. RAW and TIFF photos eat up diskspace very quickly.

Using consumer equipment in a corporate environment doesn't make sense usually, but in this case...

Often times the SAS to SATA performance hit isn't a concern for most organizations, RAID redundancy mitigates increased failure rates, SATA costs thousands less in a large array and SCSI simply doesn't offer enough capacity.

Agreed. For the most part, my company uses SCSI drives, however lately we have been shifting more towards SATA drives due to the cost and capacity. We have a few 15K SAS drives (which I love), but they are mostly used in developer machines that require the extra speed. SATA drives seem to work just fine in the server farm.

EEK... and you thought the Seagate drives over 1.5TB were unreliable? I wouldn't trust a terabyte of data with Hitachi if they gave me the drives.

@tengeta: I was wondering how long it would take for the "Deathstar" comments to show.

Ah yes, the Deathstar. Back when it was IBM-branded I exchanged three of those things in a row before I gave up. It was the first time I ever felt really stupid for having confidence in IBM quality control. The Holy Fathers at Church IBM had diddled me! Life's hard little lessons. Then Hitachi took over the Deathstar from IBM. Are you saying Hitachi continued to market them with all the notorious bugginess intact? Talk about reckless endangerment of your own customers' confidence....

I got 3 last year, 2 DOA and one that works but wipes its partition table every few months... Its livable but annoying.

The hell are you talking about? I got 500 gigs and I need MOAR! Seriously, chunks are being bitoff from programs, and backup of programs...and music, and backups of music....

5 platters works out to 400GB per platter. WD and Seagate both have 500GB/platter drives, so their 2TB offerings have 4 platters. The old 5-platter 1TB Hitachi drives ran significantly hotter than the competition, and this pattern will repeat with the 2TB drives.

Fewer platters are always better from power, heat and reliability metrics.

Oh man I could RAID 5 4 of these babies and get 6 sweet terrabytes of disk space lovelyness...

I had a IBM DeathStar in my MacPro that bit the dust after 6 months. After that, 2 backup drives but no more DeathStars in my box.
Seagate is just as bad with their bios problems on their 1T drives.

There's ALWAYS a need for MORE storage space!

I have a couple of 1Tb drives that are literally running out of room as I have media/music files that I've collected and stored over 10+ years and still going!

Now, the 2Tb drives can be used to consolidate my storage library and I can use the 1Tb as internal backup drives on my older computers instead of external backup drives!

Now... let's hope that the quality is very good and reliable!

* * Knock on wood * *