Terabyte Wars: Hitachi Aims To Beat Seagate To Market With 1-Tbyte Drive

Hitachi said Friday that at next week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it will demonstrate the 1-Tbyte Deskstar 7K1000 drive, slated to ship in the first quarter and carry a street price of $399. Hitachi also said it would ship a CinemaStar version of the drive that's optimized for digital video recorder (DVR) applications.

The Deskstar 7K1000 will have SATA 2.0Gbps and PATA-133 interfaces plus "ramp load" design and idle technology to make the drive more power-efficient, according to Hitachi. The CinemaStar version of drive also will feature "bedroom-quiet" acoustics, the San Jose, Calif.-based company said.

In the hard-drive realm, the 1-Tbyte mark is viewed as a milestone as high-definition video becomes more prevalent on desktop and notebook PCs and as Microsoft prepares to ship its Windows Vista operating system, which brings hefty hardware requirements. According to Hitachi, a 1-Tbyte drive can hold 333,000 digital images, 56 million pages of 8.5-by-11-inch text, 250 hours of high-definition movies or 250,000 MP3 songs.

A Seagate spokesman issued a statement Thursday saying that the Scotts Valley, Calif., company had received numerous inquiries into its terabyte strategy. Seagate, though, didn't provide product specifications or pricing information.