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Hitachi releases 3TB HDDs with SATA 6Gbps

by Pete Mason on 16 November 2010, 15:50

Tags: Hitachi (TYO:6501)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qa24q

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First there was Seagate in July, then came Western Digital last month and now Hitachi has joined the party with its own line of 3TB hard-drives. Rather than just being a me-too launch, these drives come with something that - at least on paper - should set them apart from their capacious brethren - SATA 6Gbps.

The high-capacity drives will be coming to the market in both eco-friendly 5400RPM and high-performance 7200RPM varieties as the 5K3000 and 7K3000, respectively. The faster models will also come with 64MB of cache while the 5K3000 drives will have to settle for a 32MB buffer, though both will feature the speedy SATA 6Gbps interface.

Even with the quicker drive's advertised maximum transfer rate of 1656Mbps (207MB/s) it won't saturate the bandwidth of SATA 3Gbps, so the inclusion actually seems like more of a vanity feature than anything else. Nonetheless, it does no harm to have a forward-looking interface on-board when it won't cost any extra.

Both drives will also be available in 2TB and 1.5TB models that will benefit from the same large cache, high transfer-speeds and faster interface in case you find 3TB be a little excessive.

Even though the drives have appeared on Hitachi's website, there hasn't been an official announcement, meaning that we're still not certain on pricing or availability. However, there are a few early listings that have the 7,200RPM drives available for £186, £108 and £70 (inc VAT) for the 3TB, 2TB and 1.5TB models, respectively. If this pricing is accurate, it would undercut the competition's high-capacity 5400RPM drives, meaning that Hitachi's slower drives could be even more affordable.



HEXUS Forums :: 10 Comments

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The Deathstar grows by 1/3rd! The emperor will be pleased.
Growing by 50% surely :P
anyone know the platter sizes of the 2TB drive?

cheers
The funny thing is, they will probably sell a ton of them because of the new SATA interface….
Don't forget, can't use them with a conventional BIOS - has to be EFI/UEFI.

In addition to the standard PC disk partition scheme, which uses a Master boot record (MBR), EFI adds support for a new partitioning scheme: GUID Partition Table (GPT). GPT does not suffer from many of the limitations of MBR. In particular, the MBR limits on the number and size of disk partitions (up to 4 partitions per disk, up to 2.2 TB per partition) are relaxed. GPT allows for a maximum disk and partition size of 9.4 ZB (9.4 x 10^21 bytes). The EFI specification does not prescribe any particular file system. The only Microsoft Windows versions that can boot from disks larger than 2.2 TB, are 64-bit Windows Vista/7 and Windows Server 2008 and later.