aurora's blog: Hitachi Launches Three Terabytes (3TB) Drives

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Hitachi Launches Three Terabytes (3TB) Drives

2TB not enough hard drive space? Looking for 3TB? Well, Hitachi GST today has launched a trio of three terabytes (3TB) hard drives.

First up, the new 3TB Hitachi Deskstar Internal Hard Drive Kit breaks the 2.2TB capacity limit on 32-bit Windows XP systems with no extra hardware required, i.e. special SATA card. Second up is a new 3TB Hitachi XL USB 2.0 drive for external storage and backup. Last up are the new 3TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 and 5K3000 hard drive families now shipping to OEMs and the channel for system builders and VARs.

So how does the Hitachi 3TB stack up against the Western Digital 2TB hard drive I just reviewed? Well, first off, I can tell you Hitachi's 2TB version retails for $169.99 vs. just $89.99 for the Western Digital 2TB model. So already, Hitachi is more per MB. The price for Hitachi's 3TB model is $249.99, which equates to $0.096/MB. The WD 2TB drive is $.044 per megabyte so it's less than half the cost. On the other hand, all the Hitachi drives ship with a 64MB buffer and a 6Gb/s SATA interface, providing quick access to data. Western Digital does not say what the buffer size is on the WD 2TB drives, but I know it's not 64MB. Might be 32MB or maybe none. So the Hitachi drives might have better performance. Will have to get one to test/review to find out who is the performance king!

Full news release after the jump...