Hitachi Unveils Huge Enterprise Hard Drive

The new Hitachi Ultrastar 10K300 is the world's first 300GB enterprise hard drive.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced the Ultrastar 10K300, the world’s first 300GB enterprise hard disk drive. Hitachi’s newest 10,000 rpm hard drive satisfies therequirements of mission-critical storage applications such as online transaction processing, data analysis and media streaming. The new 3.5-inch drives have already begun shipping and are in theprocess of being qualified at major OEMs worldwide. Hitachi expects volume shipments of the Ultrastar 10K300 to begin in the second quarter of this year.

The Hitachi Ultrastar 10K300 is built on a proven drive design with demonstrated enterprise class reliability and product quality. The new drive continues this tradition with enhanced head and disk manufacturing processes designed to extend reliability and performance. The drives will use Fluid Dynamic Bearing motors to provide a low acoustic rating and improved data integrity.

Hitachi’s time-to-market leadership and global technical support accelerates customers’ qualification process, enabling products to be delivered to customers in a shorter amount of time. The capacity and performance characteristics of the Ultrastar 10K300 provide system builders the ability to deliver more powerful storage systems to their customers. The new drives will be available in Ultra 320 SCSI and 2Gb/s Fibre Channel (FCAL) interfaces.

“Being first to market with a 300GB server drive is a significant milestone,” said Fumio Kugiya, general manager, Server Business Unit, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. “Hitachi’s technology expertise and product breadth are among the many reasons that customers are increasingly looking to Hitachi to meet their disk storage requirements. This is a significant achievement for Hitachi and is expected to solidify our position as one of the industry’s top enterprise hard drive manufacturers.”

Technical specifications:
Ultrastar 10K300
300, 146, 73, 36 GB (GB = 1 billion bytes, accessible capacity may be less)
1″ in height
10,025 rpm
61 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
5/3/2/1 glass disk platter(s)
10/5/3/2 GMR recording head(s)
250 G@2ms non-operating shock
15 G@11ms operating shock
2.99 average latency
4.7/4.5/4.3 ms average seek time (read)
1078 Mbit/s maximum internal transfer rate
89 MB/s maximum sustained data transfer rate
Ultra 320 SCSI and 2Gb/s FCAL
.75 Kg max. weight
3.4 Bels typical idle acoustics

About Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was founded in 2003 as a result of the strategic combination of Hitachi’s and IBM’s storage technology businesses. The company’s vision is to enable users to fully engage in the digital lifestyle by providing access to large amounts of storage capacity in formats suitable for the office, on the road and in the home.

The company offers customers worldwide a comprehensive range of storage products for desktop computers, high-performance servers and mobile devices. For more information on Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, please visit the company’s Web site at http://www.hgst.com.