Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Monday unveiled the new Deskstar P7K500 desktop hard drive, which it claims cuts power requirements by up to 40 percent over its predecessor T7K500 offering.

Hitachi said the 250GB version of the new drive requires 3.6 watts of power in idle mode, while higher-end models that store 350GB and more require 4.8 watts. Active Deskstar PK7500 machines require 6.4 watts to 8.2 watts of energy, the Tokyo-based company said.

The new Hitachi desktop drives will start shipping in volume before the end of the year, Hitachi officials said in a statement.

John Rydning, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, noted that most vendors are paying less attention to cutting desktop power requirements than they are to reducing those of larger systems. He suggested that users could force such vendors to work harder to curb energy requirements.

Rydning also suggested that the emerging hybrid offerings are the most energy-efficient disk drive option for corporate users today. "The last step to possibly reduce hard drive power consumption is to migrate to hybrid hard disk drives," said Rydning. "Hybrid hard drives with sufficient capacity of nonvolatile flash memory as an [onboard] cache could reduce the frequency of spinning up the drive."