One Terabyte of Storage for $399

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is the manufacturer of the current king sized hard drive in the world, the Hiachi Deskstar 7K1000, which has become available for sale at a recommended retail price of $399.

The drive itself uses the Serial ATA 300 interface, has 32MB of data buffer, 5 platters, 10 recording heads, 7.200RPM, a 4.17 ms average latency, just to mention a couple of the speed related rates. It alsi can withstand 300G/1 ms pulse non-operating shock and an operating temperature in between 5 and 60 degrees Celsius. I've discussed before about the necessity of a 1TB hard disk drive before, I still stand true to my convictions, but it seems that everybody is joining the Terabyte storage age.

Tom Cahill, director of product management at CDW Corporation, a leading provider of technology products and services to businesses, government and education, said: "Many small and mid-sized businesses are consolidating their storage environments to improve manageability and accelerate data backup and recovery. Hitachi's terabyte-capacity drive offers organizations an affordable new option to accomplish these goals while helping them to respond to increasing data management requirements."

Going head to toe with the other storage solutions out there, such as SSD-based hard drives, and hybrid hard drives, which have proven worthy adversaries on the notebook market, is going to be quite a challenge, because the need for such high storage may not be as big as the one for mobility. So it's a case of you win some, you lose some, and on the winning side you have desktop and server users which will benefit from the increased capacity and data transfer rates, but this type of a storage solution will not be viable for the mobile market any time soon.

"Delivering the one-terabyte hard drive this year is a monumental achievement not only for Hitachi and the hard drive industry, but also for the end user. Consumers' desire to create and share digital entertainment is the primary accelerator for capacity and performance increases in desktop PC hard drives. We are proud of the strength of the Deskstar 7K1000 as it is designed to meet the requirements of PC enthusiasts," said Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing officer, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.