Hitachi launches a new enterprise hard drive

Hitachi today announced the Ultrastar™ 15K450. The new drive uses perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology to deliver 450GB of storage, currently the highest available capacity in 15,000 RPM enterprise-class hard drives. This hard drive would be suitable for servers and  storage applications, such as online transaction processing, intensive database queries and other multi-user applications.

After tests conducted by Hitachi itself, Ultrastar 15K450 indicates a 30 per cent improvement as compared to its predecessor. The average seek time is just 3.3 milliseconds and because of the fast rotational speeds, the latency time reduces to as low as 2 milliseconds. The new drive will ship with either 3Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or 4Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces.

''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 datacenter's footprint and overall power requirements,'' said Dean Amini, director, enterprise market & strategy, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. ''Coupled with our intensive testing and quality assurance process, the Ultrastar 15K450 offers the highest available performance and reliability for mission-critical computing environments.''

Technical Specifications:
Ultrastar 15K450
450GB (GB = 1 billion bytes, accessible capacity may be less)
183 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
4 platters, 8 recording heads
2090 Mb/s max. media data rate
3.6 ms average seek time (with command overhead)
15,000 RPM, 2.0 ms average latency
3Gb/s SAS, 4Gb/s FCAL interfaces
16 MB data buffer
25.8 mm in height (max)
750 in weight (max)
250 G/2 ms pulse non-operating shock
SAS: 13.3 watt idle power
FCAL: 13.4 watt idle power
3.7 Bels typical idle acoustics
5 to 55 degrees Celcius operating temperature