Hitachi ships single-platter 1TB Deskstar drives

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) has unveiled hard drives that cram 1TB of storage onto a single platter, following the lead set by rival Seagate earlier this year.

Available now worldwide, Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000.D family is a line of single-platter 3.5in drives with capacities from 250GB to 1TB, aimed at high-performance desktop PCs.

Most drives typically contain more than one platter, which is why multi-terabyte disks have been on sale for some time. Reaching 1TB per platter is important as it allows Hitachi to hit attractive price points for the largest market volume segments, according to Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at the firm.

"As we ship our first 1TB per platter drives, we know we're delivering capacity, reliability and value to a broad customer base," he said.

The new drives spin at 7,200rpm and support the fast 6Gbit/s Sata interface for connection to the host system.

Seagate announced its own 1TB per platter drives back in May.

Hitachi GST is in the process of being acquired by Western Digital, while Seagate is swallowing up Samsung's hard drive business.

Both transactions are expected to close before the end of this year, although  regulators such as the European Commission are investigating concerns that the resulting companies will control about 90 per cent of the entire disk manufacturing industry between them.