Hitachi punts 2TB desktop hard drive

Hitachi became the latest vendor to offer a 2TB hard drive for desktops on Thursday, but the equivalent for laptops may still be some way off.

The 2TB Deskstar 7K2000 from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies operates at up to 7,200 RPM, providing fast access to data. It's aimed at gamers and other users who want a big, fast hard drive. It will go on sale worldwide Friday and is priced at $329 in the U.S.

It will be one of a handful of 2TB drives available. Others include Western Digital's Caviar Green Drive, which was announced earlier this year and can be bought for $229.95 on Amazon.com.

Desktop hard drives still offer up to twice the capacity of laptop drives, which reached 1TB last week with the release of Western Digital's Scorpio Blue.

Laptop drives are smaller and therefore typically hold less data. Hitachi is working to make the platters denser, said Roger Cowles, product manager at Hitachi GST, but the company isn't ready to say yet when a 2TB laptop drive might hit the market.

Hard drives are being challenged by solid-state drives based on flash memory chips, which operate faster but are more expensive. There was some early momentum behind solid-state laptop drives but users have been drifting back toward standard hard drives, Cowles said.

Hitachi is also focused on SSDs for environments that require a lot of I/O, and the company has partnered with Intel to push SSDs into the enterprise.

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