Hitachi release 3TB Hard Drive

It seems that very few companies are promoting their 3TB drives lately, and Hitachi have joined the ‘silent' launch with their new 3TB unit – the DeskStar 7K3000.

The Deskstar 7K3000 has five platters @ 600GB each and is supplied at 7,200 rpm with 64MB of cache via a 6Gbp/s SATA interface. While this sounds like big news, it comes after Western Digital announced their own Caviar Green 3TB Drive with four platters.

There are many trains of thought as to why these launches are so understated – the main one being that many Windows based computers can't see drives bigger than 2TB without manual intervention. Motherboards with UEFI support don't need an HBA to correctly recognise the drive, otherwise a AHCI compliant host bus adapter is needed.

Rated speeds are said to be around 145 MB/s which is impressive for a mechanical drive, although it still falls way short of SSD performance drives.

Pricing has yet to be confirmed but expect a reasonable price difference between current 2TB models (around £80-90 inc vat in the UK).

KitGuru says: Many NAS systems also have yet to support drives over 2TB, so be aware !

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