Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 & 5K3000

Hitachi has just announced its new generations of SATA 3"1/2 hard drives, the Deskstar 7K3000s and 5K3000s. With 7200 and 5400 rpm rotation speeds respectively, they have a maximum of 5 platters and are to be available in 1.5, 2.0 and 3.0 terabyte versions. The PC interface is SATA 6 Gbits type, with 64 MB of cache for the 7K3000 and 32 MB for the 5K3000.

To recap, beyond 2.2 TB there are compatibility issues as you have to go from LBA type addressing to Long-LBA, and MBR partitioning has to be abandoned for GPT. In terms of a system disk, this makes it necessary to have a recent 64-bit OS as well as a motherboard with an EFI type bios so that Windows can start. For a secondary disk, you don’t need a 64-bit OS or an EFI bios, but Windows XP won’t be compatible. Hitachi has published a quite thorough datasheet on the subject.