Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi) is stepping up its
effort in the enterprise
disk drive market with a trio of new products, including the
first available 1 terabyte (TB) SATA drive.
Dubbed the Ultrastar A7K1000, this 3.5-inch disk drive supports
7,200 rpm, a 3 Gbps SATA interface and up to 1 TB of capacity.
Hitachi said it's good for approximately 1.2 million hours before
failing (MTBF). And to support enterprise environments, the company
claims it has improved the rotational
vibration (RV) feature to handle 12.5 radians-per-second squared,
50% more RV than the previous model before performance is degraded.
When all drives are spinning they create enough vibration to affect
neighboring drives. The ability to cancel RV is crucial as drives
hold more and more data.
"Hitachi is hitting the need for data centers struggling with
capacity growth … they are definitely in the lead with a 1 TB
drive," said John Rydning, research manager for hard disk drives at
IDC. "But you can't keep a lead forever, Seagate is about two
quarters away," he added. Rydning says
virtual tape libraries (VTL) are a good place for this
technology, or anywhere with sequential I/O.
Hitachi also announced the 15K300, the next generation of the
15K147, a 300 GB, 3.5-inch, 15,000 rpm drive that supports Ultra320
SCSI, 3 Gbps SAS and 4Gbps Fibre Channel interfaces. The third and
final product, a 2.5-inch SAS drive, called the C10K147, is
Hitachi's first small form factor (SFF) enterprise drive, aimed at
high-speed servers. It supports 10,000 rpm and up to 147 GB of
capacity.
On both the 15K300 and C10K147 Hitachi is playing catch-up to
Seagate Technology and Fujitsu Ltd., according to Rydning. "Hitachi
is the third supplier in that [2.5-inch SAS] segment … there's good
growth there and it's important they participate." According to
IDC, the industry is expected to experience a fast ramp in
shipments from 2.4 million SAS drives in 2006 to 9.4 million in
2007 as cost, space and low power considerations in data centers
drive the need for a transition to SFF.
All three new products will ship in volume by the end of June,
according to Doug Pickford, director of marketing at Hitachi.