Hitachi hasn’t been very subtle in the method that it’s used to achieve the landmark figure but instead has ganged up five platters and ten heads to achieve the 500GB, which tells us that each platter has a 100GB capacity. That’s a surprisingly low areal density when you consider that Samsung’s new SP2504C gets its 250GB capacity from a two platter/four head design. Hitachi has form in this respect as it released the five-platter 75GXP back in the days when it sold hard drives under the IBM brand and more recently it also used five platters in the 400GB 7K400.