Hitachi 1TB drive is at retail doorsteps

Author: Brett Thomas
Published: 27th April 2007

"And now we will show them the power of this fully operational battle station." - Oh, wait...DESK star. Whoops.

When they say "It's on the slow boat to China," I think they really might mean "slow boat from China." But, no matter - today's topic is about things getting off of those boats. Things like the world's first One Terabyte HDD, courtesy of Hitachi.

The 1TB barrier has been broken since CES 2007, when Hitachi first announced its new Deskstar 7K1000. Since that point, it's been all logistics - production ramp ups, and then the long haul in shipping. The drives began shipping in mid-March, and are now starting to reach their destinations.

Hitachi's 1TB wonder is a SATA2 drive that features a 32MB buffer and runs at 7200RPM. Of course, all of those features are to be expected - what's actual news is the price. The drive will retail for only $399 USD. For those of you in the UK, we'll just have to see how the conversion works out. But at that price, it's only $0.40 per GB...not a bad price at all.

I'm sure this news will lead to the usual discussion of "What is a Terabyte," so go nuts in our forums. The drive will use the standard hard drive world's definition, so that's 1000 Gigabytes, which are actually 1000 Megabytes (instead of 1024), which still (for whatever reason) are each counted as 1024KB. Go figure.