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.
