Hitachi Debuts Small Form Factor Drive

July 3, 2007: Hitachi has begun shipping its first line of small form factor (SFF) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) enterprise hard drives, claiming low power consumption and a smaller form factor suited to blade servers and 1U/2U rack mounted servers.

The company says that due to the combination of new government mandates for “green” data centres and increasing enterprise desire to cut energy costs and reduce space requirements, the transition to SFF hard drives from traditional 3.5” drives is rapidly gaining momentum.

It notes that industry analysts are predicting 2007 to be the turning point in the take up of the technology, so Hitachi is naturally keen to establish itself as a player and compliment its other data centre storage offerings.

To this end the company is kicking off its SFF capability with the new Ultrastar C10K147 hard drive. With 147GB capacity, 10,000 RPM spin speed and 3Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface, Hitachi says it is able to deliver the required performance with a 50 percent smaller foot print and a 40 percent reduction in z-height over traditional enterprise hard drives.

“The introduction of a small form factor enterprise hard drive and our milestone one-terabyte drive add depth to our enterprise HDD line-up and allow us to further penetrate this segment with a broader range of solutions to address our customers’ needs,” said Currie Munce, vice president, Enterprise HDD Business Group, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

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