Having the world’s only 7200RPM 2TB hard drive is a sweet position to be in. For a couple weeks, Hitachi will monopolize sales among people who need both space and speed — like me! I’ll actually be waiting a bit before making the jump, since “world first” hardware on the bleeding edge of manufacturing technology tends to have flaws.
For those of you not sure what the big deal is, it’s simply that this drive spins faster than the others on the market now, which means lower latency and better read/write times. Most drives are 7200RPM, but these new large-capacity ones have been limited to 5400 or 5900 until now.
The 7K2000 is just shipping out today, so you can expect to see it on the listings here within a few days or a week. And, of course, it means lower prices for all those other sizes, so maybe next week is the time to upgrade after all.
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SPOF
Much to loose without a backup…. in fact this is starting to get seriously silly
Don’t get me wrong, I just cannot imagine what a consumer would do with such space….
I just say Hardware virtualisation and HDVideo´s xD.
Elaboration:
I have an 80GB iPod, it is full of music, far more then I could possible listen too, but I do have a great selection, yet I still have 70GB space remaining, I know, I don’t put feature length videos and such (what a waste on an iPod)
In early 80s when I was at DEC when the PDP made it to a desktop footprint, the hard drive was 512MB…. it was plenty…. LOL
How much space do we need?
I cannot wait for the first 1T USB thumb drive… maybe with wireless access…. sweet… hmmmm
In regards to your iPod, I suggest you use a lossless format (WMA 9.2, FLAC,m4a). You shouldn’t have any problems taking up all that space plus you won’t have to listen to crappy Mp3s anymore.
Imho, I love the HDD size that is becoming available especially when we finallyget to see these inexpensive prices for large storage SSD/flash because then I can store all my CDs on a drive instead of using them & I don’t have to worry about HDD crashes.
As a Wedding and event photographer I can safely say I would go through a 2 TB HDD in 12-16 months! So yes there is a very useful application for these items.
I too am a photographer and I currently have used up 4.5Tb. With the latest digital cameras, a single day’s shooting can take up 30Gb. Once I run this through Adobe Lightroom for some processing and convert to Digital Negative format I’m approaching 50Gb. I’m currently using up 2-300Gb / month. Having invested in a BLuray Writer this has been somewhat alleviated.
But trust me .. 2Tb isn’t big enough for me.
Western Digital has had theirs for months now. Seagate released theirs recently too.
In response to the comment above, the commercially available Seagate and WD drives are not 7200rpm.
(5400 or 5900 rpm i think.)
BUT:
A dirty secret…
Seagate has had a 7200 RPM 2TB drive for a while, but for some reason they only sell it in an external case.
The 2TB FreeAgent Desk ST320005FDA2E1 has a 3.5 inch 2TB drive inside. The internal drive is indeed a Barracuda 7200.11 2TB with a model number of ST32000540AS.
You can just take them out of the external case and use them as normal drives. I have had a pair mirror-RAIDed for months. These FreeAgent drives are $219 on NewEgg. ( as of today)
You can also sometimes find the bare OEM drive on ebay or the like, but they are kinda rare; just search for ST32000540AS.
Really? that’s interesting…. they must have some sort of weird restriction on them. maybe specs on latency and stuff weren’t high enough for an internal HDD.
The word is, Seagate had to let Hitachi release the 7200 2TB internal drive first since Hitachi let Seagate introduce the 1.5TB
The big three companies likely have agreements so they can all trade off being the “first” to do something. Keeps all the drives selling!
Also, since NTFS partition size (basically) is limited to 2TB in Win XP 32bit, the hard drive manufacturers are all waiting for the OS market to catch up (Vista, Windows 7, etc.) So they want to milk the 2TB market as much as possible while they wait for people to get off of XP 32bit. I happen to know that Hitachi has a 5TB design ready to go, but it is not reasonable to manufacture since XP 32bit still dominates.
they can’t possibly, in a 3.5″ design? densities aren’t nearly there, unless they’ve got like 10 platters. thing would probably heat up like crazy.
Things are moving faster than it seems.
Hitachi has pledged to release a 5TB by 2010. The have implemented something called current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistance (CPP-GMR). This pushes data density above 1TB per square inch.
You can read about it here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/04/hitachi_5tb_hdd_2010/print.html
Personally I would wait for the second generation to come out before buying it.
Really? that’s interesting…. they must have some sort of weird restriction on them. maybe specs on latency and stuff weren’t high enough for an internal HDD.
did you just quote me?
Thanks for this Devin!
I’m looking for something like this for my home nas, but as far as I can see in my comparison with WD20EADS (5400rpm) and ST32000542AS (5900rpm) the old story still stands:
7200 is great when you’re after lower seek times and speed, but it comes at the price of:
- power consumption (7.5W when idle!)
- acoustics (2.9B when idle)
- operating temperature (you may need cooling)
My worry tho is that I didn’t find any specifics on reliability. Seagate MTBF is 750K hours kicking WD with its 300K out of the pot almost immediately (not the Caviar Black with it’s simple 1.2M hours) but how much is this fish?
cl00
anybody already actually bought this and can report his/her thoughts?
I just picked up this drive on sale at Fry’s for $149 – 2TB Hitatchi internal drive kit.
Installed no problem, but I started an NTFS format 12 hours ago and it is still formatting! I’m only at 54% on my Alienware 51 Vista PC (my SeaGate Baracuda drive died).
Is anyone else seeing it take 24 hours to format the drive? Seems excessive.
I bought 2 Hitachi 2TB drives at Fry’s for $149.99 each. I opened the first one (haven’t opened the 2nd one yet) and have been trying to format repeatedly for 3 days now. Went to Vista Computer Management program and initialized disk 1 at 1863.01 GB. Within a few minutes I was at 5%… 20%… 30%… but overnight it didn’t make it past 54%. I would love to show Hitachi a screenshot but their website seems useless for support. No error message pops up; it just says “Formatting: (54%)”. Cancelled format a couple times, restarted, removed hdd and tried format over and over. Always sticks at 54%. I LIVE SO FAR AWAY FROM FRY’S!!! IS THERE ANYWAY I CAN FIX WITHOUT HAVING TO EXCHANGE!
IT IS NOW AT 97% AND STILL GOING!!! …I removed hard drive from my PC case, and plugged it in externally, using a “sata to usb” device. Tried the format in the Windows Vista “Computer Management” program. That was at 8am-PST. It is now 11:30pm-PST. IT IS NOW AT 97%. So, 15 1/2 hours later, I’m almost done formatting my new hard drive. Yay.
chris & stephen, today is Dec 31st, what happen with the hard drives, did it work? because I had the same 54% problem with the same kind of hard drive, if yes, how did you guys did it?
RE: enrique – December 31st, 2009 at 3:40 pm GMT+5: chris & stephen, today is Dec 31st, what happen with the hard drives, did it work? because I had the same 54% problem with the same kind of hard drive, if yes, how did you guys did it?
Enrique-
I removed hard drive from my PC case, and plugged it in externally, using a “sata to usb” device. ( http://www.google.com/products/catalog?rlz=1C1CHNU_enUS332US332&sourceid=chrome&q=sata+to+usb&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=11083774473608181903&ei=uCo9S4_EBpSIsgPhvNS5BA&sa=X&oi=product_catalog_result&ct=image&resnum=3&ved=0CDUQ8gIwAg# ) and it worked great. You have to use the ‘Computer Management’ program to prepare the drive 1st.
1: attach externally.
2: ’start’ menu,
right-click on ‘Computer’
choose ‘manage’ from drop down menu.
3: choose ‘disk management’ from left-hand column.
4: you’ll see the drive in the list to the right.
5: right click and choose ‘initialize’
6: when that is done you’ll still have to format.
formatting took me about 16 hours.
7: Then you can shut down, plug in drive inside as an internal drive, and then should be good to go.
Let us know!!!!
Happy New Year Chris!!!
I want to thank you for your help, but after I posted a message here I kept looking for answers and found one, ” bios update” was the solution, somehow it is a problem with the motherboard bios that is not recognizing a 2 TB sata hard drive. I have a ASUS p5n-e sli motherboard, luckily I still have all my discs and on one there is a program called ” ASUS UPDATE” , after downloading the new bios & extracted with winrar, I was able to update with 2 clicks and did the same thing that you did but as an internal hard drive.
I never had to try a bios update with my sli board, but it is EVGA. Maybe my board was made the day after your’s and had the update already. still, it’s odd that i can use it now that it is formatted. but i could only use it externally before that.