Hitachi has just broken new ground in the storage market with the introduction of their Enterprise-Class Ultrastar 15K450 HDD; the world's largest Enterprise-Class drive released to date.

The Ultrastar 15K450 boasts 450GB capacity with 16MB cache, operating at 15,000RPM spindle speed on four 112.5GB platters. Hitachi claim an average seek time of 3.6ms, and average latency of 2ms.

The drive will ship with either Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces.

You can find further information on the drive within the official announcement on Hitachi's website.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - April 16, 2008 - Assuming the reins as the enterprise hard drive performance and capacity leader, Hitachi today announced the Ultrastar™15K450. The new drive uses perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology to deliver 450GB of storage, currently the highest available capacity in 15,000 RPM enterprise-class hard drives. The Ultrastar 15K450 is an ideal solution for mission-critical server and storage applications, such as online transaction processing, intensive database queries and other multi-user applications.