The chaps over at THG have reviewed the Hitachi's 7K1000 Terabyte Hard Drive. Not only is it the first product to store up to 1,000 gigabytes on a single hard drive - beating Seagate to the market - but it also comes with a number of innovations. In addition to its Serial ATA II interface, it is the first hard drive that carries as much as 32MB of cache memory, and it is Hitachi's first 3.5" drive to implement perpendicular magnetic recording technology (PMR). The company had deployed PMR in its Travelstar 5K160 family, but not into desktop drives. Hitachi's data sheet also lists various features that help to increase reliability and reduce power consumption.

From a cost per gigabyte perspective, purchasing a Deskstar 7K1000 for an estimated price tag of $375 does not make a lot of sense. There are many 500 GB hard drives available in the area of $120-150, and two of these will give you the same capacity at 2/3 to 3/4 of the cost. Still, a whopping 1,000 GB on a single partition is easier to handle, and I'd generally prefer a single huge hard drive over other solutions, unless what you're looking for is a RAID setup.

Hitachi's new Deskstar 7K1000 is clearly worth recommending for those with huge storage requirements. Its 1 TB represents a 33% increase over Seagate's 750 GB, which is substantial, and it even outperforms the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10. However, it is not the perfect hard drive at all. Performance users should still go for a WD Raptor drive at 10,000 RPM to host the operating system, and add a second 7,200 RPM for storage. In such a case, the 7K1000 is awesome, but it also gets noticeably hotter than other 7,200 RPM drives, so it should be properly cooled for the sake of data safety.