Hitachi has waded into the 2TB drive market with not one but 2 models of internal 3.5-inch SATA 3 Gb/sec drives.

On the desktop side of things we have got the Deskstar 7K2000 while the server brigade could prefer to glance at the Ultrastar A7K2000 reviewed here. Both models use 5 platters and 10 heads to realize the 2TB capacity which is a real capacity of 1,863GB once the drive has been formatted.

There's 32MB of cache and as you would expect the drives have a 7,200rpm spin speed. The interface is SATA 3 Gb/sec (a.k.a. SATA II) which puts the Deskstar and Ultrastar in the main line but it also points to something of a difficulty for Hitachi as these new drives do not have a technical edge over competitors. The 2TB WD Caviar Black and Seagate Barracuda XT drives use four platters instead of the 5 utilized by Hitachi. This decreases the price of elements - which is handy - but as importantly it increases the areal density as the info must be packed more firmly. This implies that the read / write heads have less distance to go from one data block to the next. .