Hitachi Boosts Enterprise-Class Hard Drives to 1 Terabyte

Published: May 3, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM is just finally getting around to putting 70 GB and 141 GB SCSI disk drives in 3.5-inch form factors in as standard devices on the System i5 line, but the old IBM disk operations now owned and operated by Hitachi continues to kick out advanced disk technology that will hopefully--and quickly--find its way into its server platforms.

The most interesting of these--and one that I have been advocating to be used in the i5 platform, is the 2.5-inch SAS disk drive, the Ultrastar C10K147, which spins at 10K RPM and which has either 73 GB or 147 GB of raw disk capacity. IT market researcher IDC estimates expects SAS drives to ramp up in the enterprise server space, with 2.4 million in 2006 to 9.4 million in 2007, mainly because issues of cost, space, and power consumption are pushing server makers to do this to appease their customers. The Ultrastar C10K147 uses a 3 Gb/sec SAS interface, and burns about half the electricity of a 3.5-inch SCSI drive spinning at the same RPM and offering the same capacity.

Hitachi also announced the Ultrastar 15K300, a 3.5-inch, 15K RPM disk with up to 300 GB of disk capacity; it will also be available in 73 GB and 147 GB capacities. This disk will be available in Ulrta320 SCI, 3 Gb/sec SAS, and 4Gb/sec Fibre Channel interfaces. Ultrastar A7K1000 is a high-capacity, low cost disk that will scale up to 1 TB in raw capacity; it will also be available in 500 GB and 750 GB variants. It is based on 3.5-inch platters and spins at a slower 7.2K RPM; it comes with a 3 Gb/sec SATA interface, and would make a fine addition to the System i5 line as a disk backup unit where speed is not as important as capacity and performance compared to tape, which is orders of magnitude slower to write data to and recover data from.

The Ultrastar 15K300 will be available in the first week of May, and the other two drives will be delivered sometime before the end of June. Hitachi was not more specific than that.

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