Hitachi Unveils Enterprise-Class 15,000 RPM 450 GB Drive

Hitachi has just announced its Ultrastar 15K450 hard-disk drive that packs 450 GB of storage space using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology. It's true that such capacities are no longer new, since other companies ship 1 TB disk drives, but Hitachi's 450 GB offering spins at 15,000 rotations per minute and is the largest drive on the enterprise-class market.

The Ultrastar 15K450 is especially tailored to perform in mission-critical server and storage applications, including intensive database environments and online transaction processing. The drive is built on state-of-the-art mechanical technologies, such as fluid dynamic bearing motors, in order to keep the noise levels at a minimum, as well as Hitachi's patented head load/unload ramp that protects the data integrity.

The built-in Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology tries to predict the disturbances that usually occur while mounted into a multi-drive setup and automatically corrects the errors produced by mini-shocks of vibrations, in order to preserve data accuracy and safety.

"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.

According to the company, the internal tests unveiled 30 percent improvements in sequential throughput over the company's previous enterprise-class offerings. The drive is extremely fast and sports average seek times of about 3.3 milliseconds, with average latencies of 2 milliseconds due to its increased rotational speed.

"Coupled with our intensive testing and quality assurance process, the Ultrastar 15K450 offers the highest available performance and reliability for mission-critical computing environments," Amini continued.

The company also claimed that the drive will be available in both 3Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and 4Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces, for maximum compatibility and data troughput in a server environment.