Hitachi Reaches Terabyte Capacity

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Hitachi intros the industry's first terabyte hard drive. Hitachi's 1TB hard drive meets the needs of consumers who want to create, share and store their digital information, and lots of it. Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 will begin shipping to retail customers in the first quarter of 2007. Along with the Deskstar 7K1000 for the retail market, Hitachi is also announcing a CinemaStar version 1TB hard drive, which provides optimized capabilities specifically designed for digital video recording applications. Consumers have come to rely on their digital video recorders to record and store their favorite programs, and with the increasing availability of high-definition TV programming, 1TB of storage will become a necessity. High-definition video requires 4 to 5 times more storage capacity than standard-definition video and a terabyte drive allows viewers to easily store and retrieve almost 250 hours of HD programming.

Consumers have entered an era where everything they capture on digital still or video, listen to and write, can be saved and shared for future enjoyment. In the connected home, storage becomes the epicenter of the home network, linking the living room, the office and the bedroom together in a truly digitally-connected home. The family's games, home movies, photos and music can be stored and accessed from a variety of digital entertainment devices within the home. As the distribution of video content to social networking sites and to handheld devices becomes more commonplace, storage capacity requirements will reach new heights. In this scenario, consumers can begin to imagine what they would do with all that capacity. With 1TB, Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000, for PCs and home media centers and the CinemaStar 7K1000 for DVRs help to usher in this new era.

Hitachi's 1TB products deliver the performance and reliability required for the digital lifestyle. The 3.5-inch, 7200 RPM Parallel-ATA/Serial-ATA hard drives are built on the industry's most reliable perpendicular magnetic recording technology, first established with Hitachi's Travelstar 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch product lines.

Hitachi is focused on maximizing the value of the hard drive by spearheading the era of the "smart" hard drive. Customized features have been incorporated into Hitachi's hard drives, tailoring them for the application-set that they serve. To that end, Hitachi's 1TB hard drives are targeted to two distinct application areas:
- Deskstar 7K1000 – gaming and high-performance PCs, external storage devices and upgrade applications:
o SATA 3.0Gb/s and PATA-133 interfaces;
o Ramp load design for increased shock protection;
o Three low-power idle modes to boost power efficiency.

- CinemaStar 7K1000 – DVR applications:
o Adaptive error recovery and SMART command transport for optimized video streaming and picture quality;
o Smooth Stream Technology to optimize the drive for audio/video applications requiring reliable storage;
o "Bedroom quiet" acoustics.

Finally, an enterprise version of the TB drive designed for lower duty-cycle, high-capacity enterprise environments is currently under evaluation at major OEM customers and is expected to be available in the second quarter.

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