News

posted on 09 July 2008 09:41

Hitachi GST has announced its Deskstar 7K1000.B SATA II interface hard drive, as the world's most power-efficient 1TB drive. It has also announced a Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) option, following Seagate's FDE product.

The new three-disk design improves idle power consumption up to 43 percent over its 1TB predecessor. Increased protection against data loss and piracy is provided via BDE, available as an optional feature.

Hitachi is also shipping the Deskstar E7K1000, designed to provide high-capacity storage for low-duty-cycle, 24x7 applications.

Hitachi debuted the industry’s first 1TB hard drive in January 2007.

The new 7,200 RPM, 3.5-inch drives are available in a range of capacities from 160GB to 1TB, using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) heads and disks, delivering a maximum of 375GB of storage per platter.

Larry Swezey, director, Consumer and Commercial HDD Marketing and Strategy, Hitachi GST, said: “Now through the application of Hitachi’s advanced head, media and channel technologies, we can bring to market a terabyte drive using only three disks that has advanced performance and best-in-class power consumption. This will allow us to take the next step in making terabyte technology available and affordable in the personal storage, consumer electronics, desktop and enterprise segments.”

The better power management comes from Hitachi GST's 2.5-inch Travelstar mobile hard drives and Hitachi says the new drive delivers best-in-class power management and thermal emissions to help manufacturers meet or exceed energy compliance targets, such as the US Energy Star 4.0 criteria.

The BDE hard drive-level AES-level encryption option provides improved performance and a higher level of security than any of the previously available options such as software encryption. Data is scrambled using a key as it is being written to the disk and then descrambled with the key as it is retrieved. Data encryption at the hard-drive level is generally considered to be virtually impenetrable.

The enterprise-class Deskstar E7K1000 version ships with a 32MB buffer, five-year warranty, 1.2 million hour Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology for robust performance in multi-drive environments. It has the same low power characteristics and optional encryption technology as its desktop-class counterpart, but was specifically designed for use in nearline storage for deep data archival and other high density storage environments.

The new Deskstar drives feature a SATA 3Gb/s interface, which supports features such as hot-swap capability for high availability, Native Command Queuing (NCQ) for enhanced performance. and staggered spin-up for power savings.

They will ship to customers worldwide in July.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}