Last year, Hitachi brought the first 1TB hard drive Deskstar 7K1000 to the market in January. After more than a year Hitachi is introducing more efficient model of that hard drive the Deskstar 7K1000.B. The new hard drive has almost the same specification 3.5”, 7200 RPM, 32MB buffer and 1TB storage as the old hard drive, but with one major difference, it uses only three platters in place of five platters used in the older design. The decrease in number of platters improves idle power consumption up to 43 percent compared to last year’s model. Fewer platters results in better reliability, acoustics and seek times. Another feature added to the new hard drive is Bulk Data Encryption. This feature encrypts data as it is written to the drive and decrypts when it’s retrieved. Hitachi will start shipping the drive by end of this month for $239. The company will also ship an enterprise version Deskstar E7K1000 designed for low-duty cycle, 24x7 applications for $279.