Hitachi has just announced that they are the first company to offer a 2 TB harddisk operating at 7200 rpm. The new drive is called the Deskstar 7K2000, and will compete against 2 TB drives from Western Digital and Seagate, which run at 5900 and 5400 rpm respectively. The extra speed should give the drive faster seek times and possibly higher transfer rates than the competition, but we’ll have to wait a bit for the first reviews to be sure. The drive is shipping now, so I expect to see the first tests show up soon.
The drive is very power-hungry; according to their data sheets, it requires 7.5W when idle, compared to 3.7W for the Western Digital drive. This is partly because the higher rotational speed, but also because the Hitachi drive used no less than five platters. The company does have drives with 500 GB platters, but for this model they opted for five 400 GB ones instead. Despite the high power draw Hitachi still feels they’ve done pretty well:
The new, colossal, 2TB Deskstar™ 7K2000 blends high performance and high capacity with low power and other eco-friendly features designed to enable Energy-Star rated computers and other high performance desktop systems.
I expect a version optimized for 24×7 use to show up soon after this model; many storage vendors are eagerly awaiting a 2 TB solution for their near-line disk systems. If truly energy-efficient drives are more your thing, Hitachi has also announced some smaller drives using a new design; StorageNewsletter has some more details.
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