Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced an expanded product line that will take on the 3.5-inch ATA hard drive segment with a three-prong, performance-focused approach. Hitachi is adding three new 7,200 RPM drives to its family of Deskstar products, targeting the broadest range of 3.5-inch consumer and commercial applications: mainstream PCs and workstations, digital video recorders (DVRs), nearline storage and other enterprise ATA applications.
The Hitachi drives being unveiled today include the industry’s first half terabyte (500 GB) Serial ATA (SATA) drive for audio/video and other capacity-intensive applications – the Deskstar 7K500. In the mid-range category, Hitachi offers the Deskstar T7K250, a two-disk, 250 GB product, while the Deskstar 7K80 rounds out the portfolio with an 80 GB offering, targeting the most popular capacity point.
From industry-leading capacity to best-of-breed performance, Hitachi is also the first hard drive vendor to deliver all of the major design enhancements identified in the SATA II specification, including a 3 Gb/s data transfer rate increase across all three of the new drives. The new transfer rate represents a doubling of the previous SATA 1.0 rate and rivals that of enterprise-class SCSI drives.
The new Deskstar drives all feature a single-chip, native SATA chipset and Native Command Queuing (NCQ), which enables fast data transfer rates for enterprise ATA and other performance-based applications. NCQ is a method of controlling commands sent from the host processor to the drive to enable faster application activities for the end user.
PSTHitachi’s three new Deskstar drives meet the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) compliance directive recently issued by the European Union (EU). The EU directive requires electronics manufacturers to significantly reduce lead and other selected content from their products by August 2006. Hitachi recently announced that all Hitachi hard drive products introduced in 2005 and beyond will be RoHS compliant.
“The three Deskstar products announced today will help punctuate Hitachi’s leadership in the 3.5-inch ATA segment in capacity, performance and breadth of applications,” said Bill Healy, senior vice president, product strategy and marketing, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. “These new drives make up a comprehensive and diverse product line that will accelerate Hitachi’s growth into the highest-growth 3.5-inch hard drive segments -- spanning the low to high-end and consumer to enterprise ATA applications.”
More info and features about these drives can be found here at Hitachi.
Hitachi launches 500GB HDD
Posted on Wednesday, January 05 2005 @ 13:15 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck