It's been a while since Hitachi announced their efforts to develop the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technology for hard drives; however, Seagate beat them in the race when they launched their ST3750640AS, a 750GB HDD. At that time, it was the largest single storage disk you could find.

In a bid to one-up Seagate, Hitachi has launched their version of a PMR technology-based hard drive; the Deskstar 7K1000 series (Model: HDS721010KLA330) that has 1TB of storage space. This sure is a big development in the storage devices market and is surely the way to go but, can it match (or beat) the performance of the Seagate drive? We'll see.

The Drive

For those of us new to the term Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technology, click here for a brief explanation.

Hitachi HDS721010KLA330 features second generation PMR-based 1TB storage with a SATA interface [3 GB/s (maximum) interface]. The drive has 5 disks rotating at 7200 RPM and uses 10 read/write heads. The buffer is 32 MB (double the size of conventional drives).

The average latency of the drive is 4.17 ms (at 7200 rpm), and it has read/write seek times of 8.5 ms and 9.2 ms, respectively.

The drive features three advanced low-power idle modes viz., active, unload, and low-power. Together, they reduce power consumption up to 20% at the drive level and optimize non-operational latency. They also help in lowering drive temperatures.

The drive features a proprietary Ramp load/unload design that increases shock protection and uses less power. Here, the disk heads (in non-operating modes) are 'unloaded' to a ramp outside the disk where they rest in a low-power 'unload idle' state till activated. In low RPM drives, this can reduce power consumption by up to 50%. Ramp load/unload provides tangible benefits for the drive.

In case you lose power during a read/write operation, the drive heads are unloaded using energy extracted from the spinning disks. This patented power-saving feature helps to reduce the probability of data going corrupt, and extends the life of the drive as well.