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Image courtesy Hitachi GST
Six months after the first 750GB, Hitachi announces the 1TB marker

Not even hours after Seagate publically announced the company would unveil its 1TB hard drive sometime in the first half of 2007, Hitachi Global Storage has announced its 1TB drive.  Like Seagate, Hitachi GST claims the drive will be available in the second quarter of 2007.

The 1TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 is just one of the drives in Hitachi's scope for next week's Consumer Electronics Show.  The company also announced its 750GB Deskstar 7K750, CinemaStar 7K750 and CinemaStar 7K1000.  Hitachi CinemaStar hard drives are specifically designed for digital video players and home-theater PCs.

Both Serial ATA and Parallel ATA versions of the new high-density monsters will make appearances.  The drives spin at 7,200 revolutions per minute with an average seek time of 8.7 milliseconds.  The SATA version of the Deskstar 7K1000 will feature a 32MB read head.

The 1TB Desktar utilizes five platters from Komag, while the 750GB Deskstar uses four.  Seagate, the first drive manufacturer to announce a 750GB drive last year, also uses Komag for its platter needs.

"The industry's first one-terabyte hard drive represents a milestone that is 50 years in the making, and it reasserts the hard drive's leadership as the highest-capacity, lowest-cost storage technology," said Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing officer, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "In the 51st year, Hitachi is leading a new era for hard drives -- not only providing large amounts of affordable storage, but also customizing and optimizing hard drives to deliver products that are smarter, more durable and more useful to the consumer."

Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 750GB drive launched with an MSRP of $499 in the middle of last year.  Hitachi has bold claims for the Deskstar 7K1000 -- the company claims it will launch with a price tag of $399, or just under $0.40 per gigabyte.

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Formatted size
By olwenrda on 1/5/2007 10:08:28 AM , Rating: 1
I know this discussion has been going on for a long time, but when are they going to create hard drive sizes that conform to the actual size of 1GB = 1024mb. If you format this drive Windows is only going to show like 930GB of space, so they haven't reached truly 1TB yet.




RE: Formatted size
By TomZ on 1/5/2007 10:43:51 AM , Rating: 2
LOL, let's debate religion or politics here instead - about the same chance of reaching a consensus.

Since the marketing people are in control of things like that, we can be absolutely sure that 1TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes for these drives, and that you will not have have the 10% of the storage space that is missing due to using a powers-of-ten definition instead of a powers-of-two definition.


RE: Formatted size
By ATWindsor on 1/5/2007 11:14:33 AM , Rating: 2
Kilo is definded as 1000, mega is defined as a million and so on. It has been like this for over a hundred years, in every field, and also a good part of the computer field. They do give the actual size, windows does not, if you want 1024-prefixes, use KiB, MiB and so on.


RE: Formatted size
By Oregonian2 on 1/5/2007 2:26:56 PM , Rating: 1
Alternatively, when is Windows going to properly report the size of disks that it has mounted?



RE: Formatted size
By TomZ on 1/5/07, Rating: 0
RE: Formatted size
By ATWindsor on 1/6/2007 4:29:38 AM , Rating: 2
Kilo has been used for 1000 for over a 100 years. I can also say "kilo is 1500", but that doesn't mean that I am any less wring than the people who say "kilo is 1000". If it makes meaning to say that any use of language is wrong, the use of kilo as 1024 is wrong.


RE: Formatted size
By TomZ on 1/6/2007 9:46:21 AM , Rating: 2
Kilo may have meant 1000 for many years, but kilobyte in computer science/engineering has NEVER meant 1000.


RE: Formatted size
By ATWindsor on 1/6/2007 6:49:05 PM , Rating: 2
Yes it has, in networking it has always been used as 1000, HDs use it as 1000. Using a prefix defined as 1000 as anything other than 1000 is idiotic, and fortantly its getting less normal. If you need to represent 1024, use another prefix than a existing one that means 1000. The whole pint of the prefixes is that they represent the same number, whaterver the unit behind it is.


RE: Formatted size
By TomZ on 1/6/2007 9:36:32 PM , Rating: 2
LOL, 1KB = 1024 bytes is about as stupid as binary addressing. Oh wait, all computers use that.

Networking uses powers of ten because the signaling rates are based on powers-of-ten crystals. Memory uses powers of two because it uses binary addressing.

Get used to it - get over it. It's not going to change any time soon.


RE: Formatted size
By ATWindsor on 1/7/2007 4:15:13 AM , Rating: 2
I have no problem using a prefix that means 1024, just don't use the one that is DEFINED as 1000, and has been in use as 1000 for over a hundred years. There are existing 1024-prefixes with diffrent names one can use. If you need to represent 1024, don't use a word that means 1000.

And fortantly, it is changing, slowly but surly, It is more and more usual to use GiB if you need a binary prefix.


RE: Formatted size
By ninjit on 1/8/2007 6:36:35 PM , Rating: 2
fortantly is not a word.

At first I thought it was a type, but you spelled it exactly the same in all your posts above.

it's fortunately


Perpendicular?
By Jeff7181 on 1/5/2007 2:17:52 PM , Rating: 2
Will these utilize perpendicular storage?




RE: Perpendicular?
By MrBungle on 1/5/2007 3:09:02 PM , Rating: 2
I think they probably have to. The Seagate ones do, and I'd be very surprised if Hitachi was able to circumvent that and still get up to 1TB.

Either way, PMR offers other benefits too, and the Seagate 1TB announced other improvements like reduced heads (and I think even platters, though I may be wrong about that) that offer significantly better longevity and performance. If Hitachi can't match that, then Seagate remains on top despite the identical capacity.


RE: Perpendicular?
By Jeff7181 on 1/5/2007 4:03:37 PM , Rating: 2
Reduced heads? How is that possible? They still need one head per surface, don't they?


RE: Perpendicular?
By MrBungle on 1/5/2007 4:27:36 PM , Rating: 2
Yeah, I would assume so too. I might have misinterpreted the finer points but I'm basing that on this:

http://crunchgear.com/2007/01/04/seagate-says-1tb-...


RE: Perpendicular?
By GI2K on 1/8/2007 11:20:42 AM , Rating: 2
It's still the same... they just mean they have fewer heads and plates cause they use plates of higher density, it's like when Hitachi introduced it's 500GB disks with 5 plates (100GB) where the competition could do/did the same with just 4 plates (133GB for Seagate).

In theory less plates means cooler, quieter and more reliable HD, but theory is not always true when speaking of different HD manufacturers.


RE: Perpendicular?
By TomZ on 1/5/2007 4:47:27 PM , Rating: 2
Hitachi does have this technology, so I would bet it does - I can't imagine why they wouldn't use it. However, the 1TB Seagate is reported to have only 4 platters relative to the 5 platters reported for the Hitachi. That is an interesting difference that would seem to give Seagate an advantage in terms of noise, heat, mass, reliability, etc.


RE: Perpendicular?
By Samus on 1/6/2007 12:22:11 AM , Rating: 2
seagate is on its second-generation PDR technology, hitachi is on its first-generation. the difference is seagate can use four platters (250GB each) and hitachi needs five platters (200GB each, the same as seagate's first-generation platter density)


CinemaStar
By OrSin on 1/5/2007 11:54:15 AM , Rating: 2
I hope the CinemaStar drive come in 5400 speed. Yeah I know its slow. But if its for HTPC them speed is not a big deall and low noise is much bigger deal. Only Price should drop if you dont need the speed. I take 5400 over a 7200 if the price and niose level was right.




RE: CinemaStar
By pnyffeler on 1/5/2007 1:42:51 PM , Rating: 2
Why can't they just come up with a drive with variable speeds? For example, a drive that can be set to spin up to 7200 or 10K under certain situations, but be told to run at 5400 when the user wants quiet or low power consumption.

Although silence in a HTC would be commendable, the more obvious application would be in laptops. Imagine a laptop whose hard drive would run at 7200 rpm when plugged in and 4200 when on battery. Sure, it would be slower, but it would probably lead to a dramatic improvement in battery life. I went from 5+ hours of battery life in my Thinkpad T42 with an extended battery on a 5400 rpm drive to about 3-3.5 hours with a 7200 rpm drive.

Somebody help me!


RE: CinemaStar
By darkfoon on 1/5/2007 5:20:49 PM , Rating: 2
I have always thought that a variable speed drive would be a stupendous invention.
But I speculate that the reason we don't have them has to do with the internal firmware and internal timings.

The heads inside a drive going 10,000 RPMs need to move differently(read: faster) than in a drive going 5,400 RPMs.
Because of the vast differences in timing(at that speed), and quality of materials(ex: head servos) a variable speed drive would be infeasible.

And if all of that is wrong, then it simply comes down to money. If Seagate makes more money with 10,000 RPM drives than they do with 7,200 RPM drives, why would they create a variable speed drive that cannibalizes one of their most lucrative markets?
Also, the cost of research into a variable speed drive may be prohibitive and Seagate may not see much consumer demand in such a product. Remember, many computer users are stupid and may not know the difference between a variable speed drive and a regular one; that could, in turn, mean more stupid tech support calls, thus costing Seagate more money than just the production of the drive.