The terabyte race for consumer desktop hard drives has been on for a
long time, now the first generation of drives is here. On April 25th, Hitachi announced that it would begin shipping the Deskstar 7K1000, their latest series of consumer hard drives, weighting in at 750GB and a monstrous 1000GB (1TB). The 1TB version which we are reviewing today is slated at $399, a serious price tag for this colossal amount of storage.

The Deskstar 7K1000 represents a milestone for Hitachi and for the hard drive industry as a whole, as it is the first drive to offer a 1 terabyte capacity. However, Hitachi has not simply grabbed five 200GB platters and stuck them together to create a 1TB hard drive. Rather, there is much more to the Deskstar 7K1000, such as its Serial ATA II interface and the massive 32MB memory buffer. This is also the first desktop Hitachi drive to feature PMR technology (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording).