Hitachi announced their second generation of small form factor enterprise hard drives, the Ultrastar C10K300.

The new drives are optimized for power and performance requirements of rack-mounted servers and networked strage arrays. The C10K300 uses only 3.4W of power when idle and 6.1W when under load.

Perhaps the most important update from the previous generation is the increased transfer rate due to the introduction of a dual-port 6 Gb/s SAS interface, which doubles throughput from the previous generation. Those interested in going green will also be happy to know that the C10K300 uses halogen-reduced components as well.

No pricing was announced but the drive will be available in 147GB and 300GB capacities. You can read the full press release if you are interested.

Fast response time is critical for a wide range of enterprise applications, including online transaction processing, real-time business analytics and timely delivery of data-intensive content-on-demand such as multiple channels of streaming video. The increased transfer rate of the new SAS interface operating at 6 Gb/s is ideal for meeting these challenges. The new serial interface is fully backward compatible with existing 3 Gb/s devices to provide enterprise customers with exceptional configuration flexibility and investment protection.

The drives feature average seek times as low as 3.9 milliseconds and the fast rotational speeds reduce average latency time to 3 milliseconds, enabling customers to access data more quickly and efficiently.