Electronics maker Hitachi has quietly released a 3TB hard-drive in a way that you had to be watching to notice it.

The Deskstar 7K3000, has five platters (600GB each) and boasts a 7200RPM spindle speed, 6Gbp/s SATA interface, and a 64MB cache. Given that it is competing with the Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB drive with just four platters  you could think it is a bit shy about releasing it.

The company may be delaying its official announcement due to the simple fact that many Windows-based computers will have trouble seeing drives larger than 2TB. In the past, Hitachi has introduced hard drives with more platters than competitors but priced them lower.

The  claims the 7K3000 is up to 27 per cent  faster than 'previous generation products'. It does not say which ones, but we're probably talking about the 7K2000. The outfit says the drive has up to a 145MB/s transfer rate.

The 7K3000 will not ship with an AHCI complaint host bus adapter which would allow legacy BIOS motherboards and GPT-ready operating systems to  support large drives. Motherboards with UEFI support don't need an HBA to correctly recognise the drive.

The Deskstar 7K3000 series will have three models the HDS723030ALA640 (3TB), the HDS723020BLA642 (2TB) and the HDS723015BLA642 (1.5TB). No word on pricing yet.