Hitachi breaks 1TB hard drive barrier with 7K1000

Well, we knew it was likely to happen in 2006 or 2007: Hitachi has fulfilled their promise and broken the 1TB drive barrier with the introduction of Hitachi's new Deskstar 7K1000 drive. Thanks to perpendicular recording and the average consumers' voracious appetite for porn totally legitimate data, Hitachi's new $400 drives -- available in SATA II or PATA 133 varieties, with differing speed modes, a 32MB buffer, quieting accoustics, SMART, and a 7200rpm spindle speed -- will hit the market running in Q1 of this year. Also announced: the CinemaStar 7K1000, a DVR-centric drive due in Q2 which wasn't fully detailed, but apparently has "adaptive error recovery", "Smooth Stream Technology to optimize the drive for audio/video applications requiring reliable storage", and other buzzy sounding stuff which just seems a lot like regular old drive features. We'll assume it's better tuned for high-throughput read / write performance, and leave it at that.

[hp540 @ Jan 5th 2007 2:39AM]

lovely. so when the drive dies, you lose even more data!

[kaztm @ Jan 5th 2007 2:52AM]

"lovely. so when the drive dies, you lose even more data!"

and that's when you realize this is a Terrorbyte drive...

[duke @ Jan 5th 2007 2:39AM]

formating this sucker must be a pain in the arse..

[Joe @ Jan 5th 2007 2:58PM]

Yea, because everyone is still using DOS or Windows 95 with no way to format without surface scans?

[ARA662 @ Jan 5th 2007 2:50AM]

"7200rpm spindle speed" ..WOW! Maybee in 15 years we will see a 10000rpm.

[Ted Brown @ Jan 5th 2007 2:58AM]

Yeah man let's make it 10,000 RPM so it's much louder, but has a minimal speed increase.

[Joe @ Jan 5th 2007 2:57PM]

10K drives get HOT! And they're much louder. That's why you need special enclosures and cooling solutions for SCSI and FC disks - they spin at 10 and 15K and run very hot.

[Adam @ Jan 5th 2007 11:15PM]

hahahah, ur a creative one.

[jrepetti @ Jan 5th 2007 2:53AM]

The CinemaStar will fit comfy in my TiVo S3. There's just somethin about 1TB that put a stupid grin on my face.

[Leonard Nimrod @ Jan 5th 2007 3:04AM]

7200RPM is fine for such a large drive. The much smaller capacity drives with 10k and 15k speeds are only faster when near empty.

As you fill your drive the read/write times dwindle at a rate based on percentage used. This means that at 300GB utilized, a 1TB HDD @7200RPM (30% used) drive will read/write considerably faster than 400GB HDD @ 10,000RPM (75% used). Not to mention the additional cost and lowered overall capacity.

I'm curious about this specialized DVR drive. If Hitatchi can significantly increase the sustained read/write (especially the reads) then they may have something here.

BTW, $400 seems very aggressive for this drive.

[Chris @ Jan 5th 2007 4:20AM]

That doesn't sound accurate at all. Read times are constant for a drive, determined by the interface speed, seek time and rotational speed. A full drive or a empty drive will read data at the exact same speed. Please explain and provide sources to back up your claim that a full drive is slower.

Otherwise please stop spreading FUD.

[ARA662 @ Jan 5th 2007 3:26AM]

I meant to say 15000rpm in 10 years but good point "Leonard Nimrod"

[DagMX @ Jan 5th 2007 8:32AM]

Seagates had their cheetah harddisks out for a while and they run at 15,000rpm.

but at $400, that drive is actually pretty cheap at $0.39 per gb.

[fred @ Oct 8th 2007 9:21AM]

10k and 15k drives have been standard in enterprise raid arrays. I have had SCCI Ultra320 10/15k drives running on my Compaq Proliant servers for 4 years.

[jeffk @ Jan 5th 2007 3:31AM]

I too, intend to shoehorn this into my Series 3 TiVo. "Yep, That there's a 1TB TiVo". Not sure I'll need the eSATA port for awhile after that.

[Urbanose @ Jan 5th 2007 4:27AM]

If only the Hitachi drives wouldn't break the barrier of bearable noise...

[BlueDemon @ Jan 5th 2007 4:28AM]

I was on the market for a new hard drive, since mine are a bit obsolete.

When will these go to sale?

[Benjamin @ Jan 5th 2007 5:05AM]

Forget formatting, that only needs to be done once every....... 1-2 years if your lucky.

Its defragging and checkdisk that I would be more worried about.

At this size though, I don't think theres any way under the earth that I could buy one. I would HAVE to buy 2 and raid them so there was no chance of loosing my data.

[Hillel Aftel @ Jan 5th 2007 5:44AM]

To Leonard and Chris;

How the percentage of used space on a drive affects its speed depends on the file system in place. The old FAT/FAT32 systems used by DOS and Windows 3.1/95/98 used a variable-size "table of contents" to store information about where files were located, so more used capacity meant a larger table, which would take longer for the operating system to search through when a file was requested.

The newer NTFS file system in Windows XP utilizes a static table (MFT) which has a permanent set size; the table acts as a kind of micro-representation of the entire disk, so the OS can always easily find what it's looking for in the MFT. In that case, more or less used capacity still means the same size MFT either way, and therefore, the same amount of time to find files.

More space consumed can often mean more programs installed or temp files built up, which will bog down an OS and slow everything down; but percentage of used space itself doesn't have much if any effect on throughput or seek times, at the OS or the disk access levels.

[tara byte @ Jan 5th 2007 5:47AM]

You forgot to mention how big the drive is. When you say "breaks the 1TB barrier," are you saying it's bigger than 1TB, or it *is* 1TB? It's not clear, at least not to me. QQ.

[Leonard Nimrod @ Jan 5th 2007 1:37PM]

There is no HDD that is EXACTLY the size it says it is. To do that would be to create un-used blocks on the platters, which doesn't make any sense. A 1TB drive will be slightly over 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.

Also...
There is a lot of funky marketing when it comes to HDDs. Ever notice that your drive is never as big as it states? That is because the OS uses Base-2 to determine the capacity, while the HDD manufacture used Base-10. That same 1TB drive will only be listed as having 953,000GB. The drive appears to lose nearly 50GB off the original size, but it really doesn't. It's all marketing. I'm not a fan of but they all do it.

RAM manufactures don't do this, and I don't know of any other group that does.

[constantnormal @ Jan 5th 2007 6:58AM]

This is just the thing to stuff a simple, cheap JBOD unit with, and operate via Leopard's ZFS filesystem [http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2007/01/zfs_overview_from_sun.html].

The only thing I would like in such a box is a SATA II interface and some power-up logic that staggers the individual drive spin-ups, so as to not present a big power spike upon power-on. Something where I could just pop in new drives as my video library fills up the current drives, with the software painlessly managing the data redundancy and error detection and correction.


W00t!

[mooo @ Jan 5th 2007 9:41AM]

This is another one of those 5 platter drives (based on the press release)... pass. I'll wait until they get it in 3.

[sturmnacht @ Jan 5th 2007 1:34PM]

4TB in a Mac Pro??

[Bill Gates @ Jan 5th 2007 4:48PM]

Hate to break it to you Leonard Nimrod, but a terabyte isn't 100,000GB, it's 1000GB.

[Duder @ Jan 5th 2007 1:50PM]

Consider the geometry of how the data is stored, when thinking about the rotational velocity. I don't have precise data, but for example, if the data is half as wide, then it's actually like a 14400rpm drive.


...maybe /shrug

[bobartig @ Jan 5th 2007 2:04PM]

Media specific drives aren't optimized for high throughput, they're actually optimized for low, constant throughput, low burst speed, high seek time, low noise, and low heat. They are lower performance drives because DVR's tend to move a few gigs of data over the course of hours. Seek time is unimportant because they're only accessing a handful of files per day. Heat and noise are critical as mfr's want to make DVRs small and quiet.

[intheknow @ Jan 5th 2007 2:07PM]

So who knows how I can create my own Kaliedescape movie server? http://www.kaleidescape.com/products/
I've been waiting for the 1TB drives to debut before starting on this project. I figure I'll need about 6TB storage total.

[BlueDemon @ Jan 7th 2007 6:10AM]

I don't know mate.. but me thinks kaleidescape player should be Divx Mp4 certified... and I dont seem to find that certification (in that case I would jump in the bandwagon too!)

[Kris @ Jan 10th 2007 9:45PM]

Intheknow,
Kaleidescape is nice, but not worth the dough for us nerds. Putting the parts together is easy. It's the software that can cause pain.

-Make sure you have a gigabit ethernet network. Wireless won't cut the mustard when streaming video.
-Build a half decent computer. Make sure you have a big case and a burly power supply.
-Buy a RAID card. I prefer Areca cards with PCI-Express interface.
-Install Server Edition if you want > 2TB partition(s).
-Install software. You can get as fancy as you want depending on your preferences.

Other Options: Check out Lime Technology and Enfrant ReadyNAS for simpler plug and play storage solutions.

[derek @ Jan 5th 2007 3:11PM]

Make BETTER HARD DRIVES....... our computers are not slow but hour hard drives are!

[Stephen Cee @ Jan 5th 2007 10:32PM]

Put these in each of the Mac Pro's drive bays and we get a 4Tb Mac Pro -- nice. But the loudness truly would kill.

[Gonjie @ Jan 6th 2007 8:19PM]

While 1 TB is nice its not really new in terms of hard drives. It is new in this form though. AtomChip has had a 2TB HD out for about 2-3 years now but its based off of solid state and runs about $8,000. then again they also have the 6.8g proc also. all of which could be yours if your willing to shell out the 18,000 to 24,000 for the labtop. little out of my range yet.

[USC_tech @ Jan 12th 2007 9:41AM]

that's so stupid....AtomChip is a Hoax website....There is no 6.8GHZ proc, 2TB HD, or 1TB RAM chip. I hope they didn't jip you out of a few thousand dollars!

[Tim @ Feb 8th 2007 1:12AM]

Any hard drive with perpendicular recording technology is significantly faster than one without, all other factors being equal. Each bit on this hard drive takes up less space linearly on the hard drive, thus more bits pass under the drive head any give second. So it will definitely perform more like a 10,000 or higher RPM drive.

[ComputerGeEk79 @ Mar 9th 2007 5:16AM]

WOW! A huge HDD that is.
If I need more space I could just buy myself a eksternal HDD with 2TB(Yes it does exists, but it is several HDD in one I think). I buy myself a server with 10 slots and stuff them with 1TB each = 10TB I probebly have to wait another 2 years for a server that supports that.

A couple of question I ask myself is:
1.Do I need a pile of ice to place my server inside (or the HDD)?
2.Why do I have to wait 2 years for 1TB HDD when I can buy 750GB HDD today?
3.Do I need a super special server?
4.Did I register with somewhere to post this?
5.Why did I post this?
6.Why do I ask this silly questions?
I'm not making anymore sence so I quit writing now.
Have a nice day everyone :D

[Dankoozy @ Mar 17th 2007 10:14AM]

Flash disk manufacturers. I bought a 2GB flash drive, and even after removing the U3 crapware it wasn't even 2,000,000,000 bytes. it was like 1.5MB less. Not 2gb by anyone's standards