Hitachi squeezes one terabyte onto a single hard drive platter

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has announced that it has started shipping hard disk drives that cram a terabyte of capacity onto a single spinning platter.

The new single platter technology is now shipping in the Hitachi Deskstar, Travelstar and CinemaStar lines in storage devices with capacities ranging from 250GB to 1TB.

The new technology allows Hitachi to produce slimmer form factors.

Utilising the higher-capacity platters, Hitachi said it has produced new 3.5 inch wide, 7mm thick "z-height" drives targeted at everything from desktops and TV set-top boxes to ultrathin and light notebooks.

For the notebook market, Hitachi's Travelstar Z5K500 drives offer up to 636Gbit per square inch on a platter that spins at 5200RPMs.

Hitachi's new Deskstar 7K1000.D 7200rpm and 5K1000.B 5200rpm drives, which utilise a 6Gbit/sec SATA interface and a 32MB cache buffer, are designed for commercial desktops, external storage arrays and PC gaming systems.

The new Deskstar line uses CoolSpin technology to save up to 15% power over standard drives by idling down the spindle. CoolSpin technology is an optimization of motor speed to provide a balance of performance, power utilisation and acoustics.

Hitachi GST's CinemaStar 7K1000.D and 5K1000.B hard drives are aimed at the market for storage-based TVs and DVRs that record, playback, surf and stream content from and to devices.

Single-disk capacities ranging from 250GB to 500GB make up about 90% of disk drive demand for consumer electronics devices. Hitachi's new CinemaStar drive family now doubles that capacity for video content.

"The areal density race continues and while having the highest capacity is appealing, reaching 1TB per platter is equally important as it serves a full range of applications and opportunities across the industry's largest market volume," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at Hitachi GST.