Hitachi has released specs of its new 7,200rpm Deskstar 7K3000 series as well as a new 5,200rpm Deskstar 5K3000 series of hard drives with capacities up to 3TB. Hitachi has been a favored drive make for my personal systems for a while now (I use probably 40% Hitachi with the rest Western Digital and Seagate drives).
Although I did not see a press release on the topic, which is why most news sites probably have not picked this up, a quick browse of Hitachi’s site shows a new Hitachi 5K3000 series drive with an areal density of 411Gbits/ sq. in. The 5K3000 series promises 29% power savings over the new 7K3000 series.Also on Hitachi’s site is a refresh to the 7,200rpm 7K2000 line. The new Hitachi 7K3000 series comes with 64MB of cache and promises up to 30% lower idle power consumption over the 7K2000 series drives. The 7k2000 series is known for both excellent RAID controller compatibility yet higher power consumption than current generation rivals from Seagate, Western Digital, and Samsung.
3TB, 2TB, 1.5TB capacities of both drives begin the obsolescence process of <1TB drives). Another interesting note is that both of the new drive series will be using the newer 6.0gbps SATA III interface.
I have not been able to find retail availability of these drives yet, but it seems as though Hitachi, while late to the 3TB game, is bringing both a 7,200rpm variant and a 5,200rpm variant to compete with Western Digital, Seagate, and Samsung’s differentiated offerings.
Hopefully I can see of these drives in my server in the coming months, though I imagine that, as always the second highest capacity will retain the price:GB lead for quite a while.