Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) has expanded its Ultrastar hard disk drive product family, targeting the enterprise and data centre markets.
The Ultrastar line features both 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives for use in server and storage server environments. Brendan Collins, vice-president of marketing at Hitachi GST said the new drives, which include the Ultrastar 15K600 and the Ultrastar C15K147, are ideal for market verticals such as financial institutions, insurance companies and other large companies that have data centres.
Collins says the new product additions help address the needs of today’s mostly flat IT budgets.
“IT budgets in the industry today are typically flat,” Collins said.
“But the need for data continues to grow and businesses want to see new technologies that help them meet their storage efficiency requirements. The new drives are designed for (users) who care about thermal and cooling in the data centre and are to help IT managers reduce their overall total costs of ownership by providing a return on investment.”
The Ultrastar 15K600 drive is designed to provide high capacity and performance in the enterprise, Collins explained. The 3.5-inch drive features up to 600GB of capacity and 15,000 RPM (revolutions per minute). When compared to its predecessor, Collins said the 15K600 has 33 per cent more storage space and is 23 per cent faster with improved response tmes. This drive comes in 300GB, 450GB and 600GB capacities and is suitable for organizations that do things such as business and online transaction processing, file-sharing and more.
The Ultrastar C15K147 hard disk drive is a 2.5-inch drive designed to provide high speed in limited, or confined spaces. The drive spins at a speed of 15,000RPM and also has Hitachi’s Advanced Power Managment technology built into it, allowing for 50 per cent less power than what usually comes from a similar 3.5-inch Hitachi drive. This drive comes only in 73GB and 147GB capacities.
The two Ultrastar 15,000RPM drives enable users to build storage systems with “better performance and lower power,” Collins said. The drives are also optimized with self-encrypting capabilities to provide protection at the disk drive level.
This is a feature that comes on the drives and users have the option of turning this on, he added. In addition to this, the drives are also built with Rotational Vibration Safeguard technology to help protect the drives from vibration.
“If you put thousands of these drives in a rack, they tend to cause a lot of vibration,” Collins said. “When you write to one drive, you have to make sure the vibration doesn’t cause you to mis-write or write off track.”
Both the Ultrastar C15K147 and the Ultrastar 15K600 drives are now shipping worldwide to the channel and also come with a five-year warranty backed by Hitachi.
