Storage needs in the enterprise and consumer spaces are not the same. Consumers tend to want more capacity and don't always care as much about power savings and all out performance as some sectors of the enterprise market does. In a large enterprise data center with lots of storage drives a small savings in power consumption can add up to big savings in an electric bill. Hitachi has shipped a new enterprise class HDD called the Ultrastar C10K600.

The new HDD comes in several capacities with 300GB, 450GB, and 600GB versions all using 2.5-inch form factors to take up less space and use less power than similar 3.5-inch offerings. The new 10K rpm HDDs are 15% faster when it comes to random performance and 18% faster for sequential performance than competing products on the market today. At the same time the performance increases, the drives also need 22% less power than competing products on the market.

The new drive has a dual port 6Gb/s SAS interface for fast data throughput. The drive is also the only one in its class that uses a 64MB cache to optimize the read/write response time. The average seek time for the drive is as low as 3.7ms with latency of 3ms. The drives are intended to be used in Tier 1 data center, Enterprise network storage arrays, blade servers, and rack-mounted servers. The drives can also be ordered with optional bulk data encryption feature. The drive needs only 5.6W of power in read/write operation and 3.1W in idle mode.