HITACHI CLAIMS that it's now making the most energy-efficient 7,200 RPM 1TB HDD in the world, improving on idle power consumption by up to 43 percent over its predecessor.

The new three-disk design can pack in up to 375GB of storage per disk, where as the original Deskstar 7K1000 weighed in with five platters and ten heads for the same capacity. A substantial improvement, then again it has been 18 months since its first outing and everyone else on the block has come to town with their version.

Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B – the next generation

As an optional feature to users Hitachi has bundled in Bulk Data Encryption (BDE). Beforehand, data on the drive could be protected by either software-based encryption or a system-level password. Now with bulk data encryption, drive contents can be scrambled using a key as it’s being written and then descrambled with the key as it’s retrieved. This approach is widely considered to be virtually impenetrable with its strong Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) that has been certified to deliver the strongest commercial data security protection around.

Expect to see the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B shipping worldwide in July, with a $239 price tag.

Let’s hope the buyers at IBM's disk drive division now get it right, on the second take of the first terabyte drive. µ