Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has rolled out its second-generation terabyte hard drive (HDD), which it claimed to be the most energy efficient 7200rpm 1TB HDD. The 3.5" Deskstar 7K1000.B consumes 43 per cent less power than its predecessor, Hitachi said. That's in part because it uses three platters, each holding up to up to 375 GB of data, rather than five, cutting the number of read/write heads from ten to six. Part of the energy-efficiency also comes from the fact that 3Gb/s SATA (SATA II) drives also use power management techniques developed for mobile hard drives.

Hitachi said the drives provide on-board automatic data encryption based on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)tough enough for the US government. The Deskstar 7K1000.B and an enterprise version designed for 24/7 operation, the Deskstar E7K1000, go on sale later this month priced at US $239 and US $279, respectively.

Watch.impress.co.jp is reporting that Western Digital has quietly updated its Caviar GP line of drives in Asia with a platter density of 334GB in the 1TB capacity drive. Currently WD is offering two 334GB-per-platter hard drives, the 320GB (only the latest generation) and 640GB WD Caviar SE16 models. The 1TB to join with three 334GB platters is WD Caviar GP (Green Power) model number WD10EACS-00D6B0. The drive is manufactured on 12 May, 2008. Presumably, all 1TB Caviar GP drives manufactured after this date will use 334GB platters. Other specs of the drive remain the same with 16MB buffer size and 7200 rpm spindle speed.

Maybe not as portable as the WD Mac-formatted My Passport Studio portables, Samsung is also adding a new offer to its hard disk line-up. Offered both as an external hard drive or an internal drive for desktop PCs, Samsung's new 3.5-inch 1TB EcoGreen F1 hard drive is said to provide a 15 percent power savings compared to other low-powered one terabyte capacity hard drives and a 50 percent power reduction against traditional one terabyte hard drives. The EcoGreen F1 hard drive also offers the highest capacity per disk for one terabyte hard drives, at 334GB per platter. Moreover it utilizes low noise operation technologies such as SilentSeek and NoiseGuard. All Eco drives come with 3.0Gbps SATA interface, native command queuing features along with a 32MB buffer memory. Sounds almost perfect, but these drives have one major downstream, they incorporate 5400 rpm rotational speeds, not 7200 or even 10k rpm like today's modern drives. The EcoGreen F1 will launch in the second quarter of 2008.

Seagate today announced it has begun worldwide shipment of its 1 terabyte (TB) enterprise-class Barracuda ES.2 hard drives with a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface. Applications addressing rich media content and collaborative applications like email can benefit from the average 135% performance boost over SATA-interface drives along with robust enterprise features and native compatibility.