July 9th Computer Hardware News
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Hello everyone and welcome back to Hardware Revolution. If it’s your first visit here, welcome to the site, it’s a pleasure meeting you! Today, I’ve got some news on the new generation of hard drives from Hitachi, the 7K1000.B and the business class ones, the E7K1000.
Hitachi, that was late until now with the competition, hard drive density wise, just announced a new generation of Deskstar, the 7K1000.B, that allows them to go beyond what Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital offers, with a density of up to 375 Gb per platter! Produced in capacity of 160, 250 (8Mb of cache) , 320, 500, 640, 750 Gb and 1 Tb (16 Mb of cache), the 7K1000.B don’t all offer the same density.
If Hitachi did not communicate on the number of platters for each of thoses drives, they are separated into 3 groups, depending on noise and power consumption. 160/250/320 Gb (3.6w and 25 dBA at idle), 500/640/750 Gb (4.4w and 24 dBA at idle) and 1 Tb (5.2w and 27 dBA at idle) : I conclude that they have respectively 1, 2 and 3 platters, the extra noise from the single platter could be explained by a simplified hard drive case.
Only the 750Gb seems to have two 375 Gb platters. What about the others? If you take a look at their capacity, they could have either a lower density or use only part of the platters. If you take a look at the 1 Tb drive, you could either have 3 platters of 333 Gb fully used or 3 platters of 375 Gb, used at 89% of their capacity. Such a thing already happened with Hitachi. Only tests will reveal this.
Hitachi announced that the 7K1000.B and the server edition, the E7K1000(it differs by a 32Mb cache, a 5 years warranty and a MTBF of 1,200,000 hours) will be delivered this month to customers.
