New hard drives usually promote either greater performance or higher capacities, but the Hitachi Deskstar P7K500 instead touts its power-saving advantage over the competition. The Deskstar P7K500 series supplies power consumption usage as low as 6.4W (active) and 3.3W (idle) for a single-platter drive.

The Hitachi Deskstar P7K500 line offers a 7200 RPM speed, 8MB to 16MB of data cache, and will include drives in 250GB, 320GB, 400GB, and 500GB capacities. Hitachi is being flexible as well, and the line will include both SATA 3.0 GB/s and ATA-133 configurations. The Deskstar P7K500 release is designed to help PCs hit Energy Star 4.0 requirements, and the drives feature advanced power management and HiVERT (Hitachi Voltage Efficiency Regulator Technology) technology, which will help increase energy efficiency without sacrificing performance.