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Hitachi ships 1TB-per-platter desktop hard drive

Hitachi announces the availability of new desktop hard drives that are based on 1TB-per-platter technology.

Dong Ngo SF Labs Manager, Editor / Reviews
CNET editor Dong Ngo has been involved with technology since 2000, starting with testing gadgets and writing code for CNET Labs' benchmarks. He now manages CNET San Francisco Labs, reviews 3D printers, networking/storage devices, and also writes about other topics from online security to new gadgets and how technology impacts the life of people around the world.
Dong Ngo

The new Deskstar 7K1000.D hard drive from Hitachi
The new Deskstar 7K1000.D hard drive from Hitachi Hitachi

Hitachi announced today that it's now shipping hard drives in the Deskstar and Cinemastar desktop families that are based on the new 1TB-per-platter technology. These are the company's first drives that achieve this milestone of areal density.

In the Deskstar family, Hitachi is shipping the Deskstar 7K1000.D and Deskstar 5K1000.B; in the Cinemastar family, there are the Cinemastar 7K1000.D and Cinemastar 5K1000.B. In both cases, the 7K1000 drives are high performers that spin at 7,200rpm; the 5K1000 drives are those with Hitachi's CoolSpin technology that enables the drive to use up to 23 percent less energy while idling.

Hitachi says the Deskstar family is for desktop computers, and the Cinemastar family is optimized for use in audio and video applications, such as storage-based TVs and DVRs.

Despite the fact that the new drives support the highest areal density among hard drives currently on the market, they offer only up to 1TB of storage space. They do use just one platter (as opposed to two more platters) and therefore might use less energy, and they are thinner than other, standard drives.

All the new drives support SATA 3 (6Gbps) and have 32MB of cache memory. They are available now but it's unclear how much they cost.