Its fun to think that ten years ago the biggest hard drive available was 73 gigabytes. However with the constant and near unstoppable push to solid state drives, hard disk manufacturers must continue to press on. Fast forward to today and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies becomes just the first vendor to announce a 2TB 7,200RPM desktop hard drive.
Hitachi is not the first hard drive manufacturer to reach 2TB, Western Digital did that earlier this year, but the first 2TB drives were limited to a read/write of 5,400RPM. Seagate hit 5,900 RPM earlier this year as well, but again these new drives will have a distinct speed advantage. These early speed disadvantages slowed sales for businesses and professionals, who need to move large amounts of data, and quickly. The new drives are 3Gbit/s SATA II with a 32MB cache, and feature five hard disk magnetic platters.
While this upgrade comes on the desktop front, Hitachi has said that they are working to make laptop hard drives larger as well, which are traditionally much smaller than their desktop counterparts. One would have to assume that advancements on 2.5"" laptop hard disk platters would be directly because of growing SSD market share. And while Hitachi has pledged to create several new technologies to condense large density platters, a 2TB laptop drive is not likely coming anytime soon.
The new desktop drives will be launching this Friday and will be list priced at $329.00 US. For more information on Hitachi Global Storage Technologies check out https://www.hitachi.com