Hitachi Slims Down Ultrastar Hard Drives

Hitachi has announced its first 2.5-inch enterprise-class hard drive, offering low power consumption, 10,000 rpm, and capacities up to 147 GB.

Electronics manufacturer Hitachi is looking to reinvigorate its enterprise-class storage business by announcing three new hard drives, includig the Ultrastar C10K147, a new small form factor 2.5-inch hard disk drive that offers capacities of up to 147 GB, spins at 10,000 rpm, and offers low power requirements while delivering 3 Gb/s over an SAS interface. Hitachi aims to show it can keep up with the Seagates and Fujitsus of the world and sell storage to enterprises and large organizations…and it already has long-time partner Hewlett-Packard on board.

"As the first to market with a full portfolio of small form factor SAS-based servers and storage, HP offers customers innovations that maximize the performance, reliability, power savings and other efficiency advantages of their IT investments," said HP’s Ron Noblett, VP of HP’s Shared Technology, Industry Standard Servers and BladeSystem Division. "With Hitachi as a valued technology provider and its Ultrastar C10K147, we will continue to help drive the industry’s transition into the small form factor market."

Transitioning from 3.5-inch disk drives to 2.5-inch disk drives is a way to increase data density in servers without necessarily increasing power requirements. A typical one-unit rackmount server offers bays for two 3.5-inch drives; using 2.5-inch drives, a one-unit server can accommodate as many as six drives.

Hitachi’s other drive announcements today are 3.5-inch units, with the Ultrastar 15K300 offering up to 300 GB of storage capacity, a spin rate of 15,000 rpm, and support for 3 Gb/s SAS, 4 GB/s FCAL, and Ultra320 SCSI, while the UltraStar A7K1000 offers up to a terabyte of capacity at 7,200 rpm. The 15300 will be available in May; the c10K147 and A7K1000 will be available during the first quarter of 2007.