Hitachi Speeds Enterprise Drives

April 17, 2008: Hitachi has rolled out a new enterprise hard disk, promising the usual bundle of increased performance and greater capacity.

The firm’s 450-Gig Ultrastar 15K450 uses perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology to become the highest capacity 15,000 RPM enterprise-class hard drive currently available.

Hitachin says the drive is ideal for mission-critical server and storage applications, such as online transaction processing, intensive database queries and other multi-user applications, and claims that it offers a 30 percent improvement in sequential throughput over its predecessor.

Average seek times have been cut to as little as 3.3 milliseconds, while the high rotational speeds have reduced average latency time to 2 milliseconds - enabling more data to be accessed at greater speed and efficiency.

As it has been designed with enterprises in mind, the drive includes technologies such as fluid dynamic bearing motors for a low acoustic rating and improved data integrity, and Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology which anticipates disturbances that can occur in multi-drive configurations and counteracts them.

The new Ultrastar also uses Hitachi’s patented head load/unload ramp to minimise integration induced drive damage.

“With the higher capacity and performance of the Ultrastar 15K450, enterprises are able to address their throughput requirements using fewer drives, which reduces three things; the cost of ownership, the datacentre’s footprint and overall power requirements,” said Dean Amini, director, Enterprise Market & Strategy, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

The new drive will ship with either 3Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or 4Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces.

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