Accelerating the Tera era with delivery of new hard drive

With the announcement of its second-generation one terabyte hard drive, the Deskstar 7K1000.B, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is forecasting the dawn of a new age in technology that it has dubbed the “Tera Era.” As the amount of digital information created, captured and duplicated around the world continues to grow at an uninterrupted, unrelenting pace, Hitachi’s vision is that three elements – rich media content, culture, and increasing capacity – are uniting to create an entirely new landscape for enterprise and consumer data storage.

The Deskstar 7K1000.B provides an exceptional blend of power efficiency and performance, making it an ideal solution for power-friendly consumer and commercial PCs. The three-disk design improves idle power consumption up to 43 percent over its 1TB predecessor, which was already among the industry’s most energy efficient hard drives. Increased protection against data loss and piracy is provided via Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) which is available as an optional feature to users. Hitachi is also shipping the Deskstar E7K1000, designed to provide high-capacity storage for low-duty-cycle, 24x7 applications.Entire libraries of photos, movies, music and games are increasingly being stored and accessed from a variety of digital entertainment devices within the home and a plethora of mobile devices. As the distribution of video content to social networking sites and to handheld devices becomes more commonplace, storage capacity requirements will only continue to increase. Hitachi’s latest terabyte drive delivers the performance and capacity required for today’s increasingly mobile digital lifestyle.

The 7,200 RPM, 3.5-inch drives are available in a range of capacities from 160GB to 1TB. The drives are built using Hitachi’s proven and patented perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) heads and disks, delivering a maximum of 375GB of storage per disk with a high level of reliability.

GROWING IMPORTANCE OF POWER EFFICIENCY

By applying Hitachi’s seventh-generation power management technology and innovations pioneered on the popular 2.5-inch Travelstar line of mobile hard drives, the Deskstar 7K1000.B delivers best-in-class power management and thermal emissions to help manufacturers meet or exceed energy compliance targets.

Power consumption has become an important factor in technology purchase decisions, with an increasing number of consumers now actively seeking out products that are ENERGY STAR compliant. The ENERGY STAR 4.0 specifications released by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are recognized worldwide as a way to identify energy-efficient PCs and other computer equipment. PCs that meet the ENERGY STAR 4.0 criteria are expected to become increasingly popular by consumer and commercial customers for years to come. Some corporations are choosing to purchase ENERGY STAR PCs as part of their “green” initiatives. The low power characteristics of the Deskstar 7K1000.B hard drive contribute to a reduction in overall system power requirements, which helps PC manufacturers achieve ENERGY STAR ratings.

PROTECT YOUR DATA

The Deskstar 7K1000.B also features optional BDE for hard drive-level data security. Previously, data on a hard drive could be protected either through software-based encryption or a system-level password. However, hard drive-level encryption provides improved performance and a higher level of security than any of the previously available options.

When employing bulk data encryption, data is scrambled using a key as it is being written to the disk and then descrambled with the key as it is retrieved. Thus, data encryption at the hard-drive level represents a more sophisticated approach of securing users’ data and is generally considered to be virtually impenetrable. The Deskstar 7K1000.B uses an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) that has been certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to deliver the strongest commercially available data security protection. Only hard drives that have received this certification are eligible to be used by the US government for national security applications.