Hitachi quietly slips in new, big hardness
And Hitachi makes three, so it's over to you, Samsung
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Has the 3TB drive cookie crumbled with Hitachi GST's stealthy product, or will Samsung bring out its own 3TB EcoGreen drive?
Hitachi GST has revealed the 3TB Deskstar 7K300 on its website, but with no PR fanfare. It's a 7,200rpm, 3.5-inch drive with a 6Gbit/s SATA interface, a first for Hitachi GST, and comes in 1TB, 2TB and 3TB versions. The areal density is 411Gbits/in2 and it has a 64MB cache.
Seagate's 3TB Barracuda XT has five platters, a 32MB cache, and slower 3Gbit/s SATA interface. WD's 3TB Caviar Green has four platters having 750GB on each platter, suggesting a 514Gbits/in2 areal density level. It spins at 5400rpm, has a 64MB cache and the same 3Gbit/s SATA interface as the Barracuda. This means Hitachi GST's 3TB drive has the highest speed interface of the three.
Hitachi says its new drive shows a 27 per cent improvement over the previous Deskstar 7K2000 generation in PCMark Vantage testing scores and can be up to 30 per cent more power-efficient. There is a guide (pdf) to where and how you can use the product as it breaks a 32-bit Windows drive barrier of 2.2TB capacity.
Now that the three hard disk drive industry leaders have each brought out 3TB drives, the remaining player who could, Samsung with its EcoGreen line, currently topping out at 2TB, has yet to jump. After it does, if it does, then it's a waiting game to the end of 2011 or early 2012 for the next high-capacity tide mark, 4TB or perhaps more. ®
COMMENTS
Scary.
I remember taking the piss out of a friend when he took delivery of his new Gateway desktop with its 1GB hard drive. Ridiculous to have so much storage on a home machine; he'd never fill it...
Now 1GB is considered unworkably restrictive in a mobile handset, which will routinely arrive with four times that storage on a card smaller than my fingernail. Seems the future arrived when I wasn't paying attention, and it's even less realistic than I expected...
Backup?
Each year we move further and further away from ways to actually backup all this data.
A colleague was saying, what we actually need is effectively a record to backup our data to.
Something solid and won't be affected by the Sunday doing a funky dance, or someone dropping a nuke a mile or two away.
Something you can backup lots to, but also keep for a large amount of time.
It's just a wating game before we start losing considerable amounts of data.
1GB?
You can run a perfectly good commercial program in 12K as long as you page sections of it in from the cassette drive.
(Can we have a "Four Yorkshiremen" icon?)
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