Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000

Right click on 'internet', select 'save as', and dump the lot on this mother. You may need a couple...

We’ve been waiting for this day, much like a kid waits for Christmas. Or Hanukkah, or whatever you may celebrate. Either way, we’ve really, really been anticipating the arrival of the terabyte drive.

It doesn’t look like much to begin with. In fact it’s contained within the same old 3.5" form factor that we’ve known for around two decades. Nonetheless it is still the first terabyte drive, so the award goes to Hitachi for crossing the line first. Much like AMD hitting 1GHz first, Hitachi will probably be long-remembered for this technical achievement.

Apart from the surprise that it’s finally here, what’s even more eyebrow-raising is the somewhat affordable price of $599, a figure that can only drop over time. It’s also surprisingly quiet, and comes with the benefit that most large drives possess – it’s bloody fast.

How fast? Well, for reference, our current king for sustained speed is the Western Digital Raptor, a 10,000rpm drive that under the HDTach 32MB test pulls an astounding 78.2MB/s. For burst speed it’s the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB at a brain chafing 274.6MB/s.

The Hitachi manages 191.8MB/s for burst with Seagate leaving it in the dust in this respect, but for sustained it manages a pants-tent-popping 72.7MB/s, the closest a desktop drive has ever been to the holy Raptors, especially considering it’s spinning 2800rpm less per minute. What surprised us was even at this speed, the hard drive was exceptionally quiet, to the level you expect in Samsung drives. Stellar.

So that’s $290 more than your average Raptor, significantly quieter, at 5.5MB/s sustained less, for 850GB more storage. If the pure size and potential data loss doesn’t disturb you, we can see this one turning up in a few performance systems.

We’re quite sure the Seagate competitor will be along soon, and we welcome it for two reasons – one, to see how its performance will stack up, and two, to drive down the price of these monster drives. With disks this size, you almost don’t need to think about RAID 5 anymore – two disks in RAID 1 will do just nicely.

For now, Hitachi owns the crown.