14 DAY TRIAL // There is an ever increasing demand for more and more hard disk drive storage space and general performance and the Hitachi company has just released a product that should address the high-end need of storage solutions with the competing Samsung and Seagate offerings soon to follow.
Since the competing products from Samsung and Seagate will only be available from the late August and September, the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 has a few months to steal the limelight. The Hitachi desktop hard disk drive is what is called a second-generation of Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) hard drive.
Coming with four platters with ten heads, the Hitachi hard disk drive has fewer in-motion parts than its yet to be released competitors, so the risk of a mechanical defect is lower. But there is the argument that the more platters there are inside a drive, the less high density surfaces are needed, so less chance of a read or write error, which would lead to increased performance. As always with the hardware components, the truth is somewhere in the middle. The Deskstar 7K1000 is of a 3.5-inch form factor, 7200 RPM, 32MB Buffer, S-ATA based 3.0 Gb/s (also known as SATA 2) since the ATA standard is pretty much an obsolete one these days.
According to its documentation cited by the Web based news site The Inquirer, the Deskstar hard disk drive is capable of some impressive feats like reduced seek times to 8.5 ms read and 9.2 ms write, while the patented Silent-seek time is just 14 ms read and 15 ms write. The disk heads come with a special "ramp load/unload" design, that in the idle states shift the heads outside the disk to conserve energy and protect the data surface. This design should save as much as 50 percent more energy as opposed to classical disk power saving technologies. Another power saving technology implemented into the Deskstar drive is the use of three low power modes that are designed to extend the drive life by using non-operational modes.