Hitachi Ships Industry's Fastest, Most Power Efficient 10K RPM Enterprise Hard Drive

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced the industry's fastest and most power-efficient, 10K RPM, 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Enterprise hard drive, the Hitachi Ultrasta C10K600. The new 2.5-inch, 600 GB Hitachi drive delivers up to 15 percent better random and 18 percent faster sequential performance than competitive products on the market today 1. The Ultrastar C10K600 drive also sets a new standard for energy-efficiency with an operating power specification that is at least 22 percent lower than the competition2. Built on a field-proven platform to ensure greater reliability and reduced qualification time, these compact Ultrastar drives deliver the power, performance and high storage density requirements for Tier 1, Enterprise networked storage arrays, blades and other rack-mounted servers.

The Ultrastar C10K600 drive family is offered in 300GB, 450GB and 600GB versions, providing capacity parity with 3.5-inch drives. At 2.5-inches, these small form factor drives occupy 70 percent less physical space and consume 65 percent less power than Hitachi's 3.5-inch enterprise hard drives. Their capacity and performance attributes allow users to transition seamlessly from larger storage systems to more efficient designs based on 2.5-inch drives. The resulting higher density servers and storage arrays reduce space requirements, lower cooling costs and reduce the total cost of ownership.

"The Ultrastar C10K600 is closely aligned with customer requirements for increased performance, improved server/storage density, greater power efficiency and lower total cost of ownership," said Brendan Collins, vice president of Product Marketing, Hitachi GST. "We are proud to establish new power and performance benchmarks with our latest Ultrastar drives, while delivering to customers the proven quality and reliability they have come to expect from Hitachi."

Leadership Performance

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 Ultrastar C10K600 drive sets a new performance standard for 10K RPM 2.5-inch hard drives with up to 18 percent faster sequential and up to 15 percent better random performance than competitive products.

The drives ship with a dual-port 6Gb/s SAS interface, providing fast data throughput, configuration flexibility and investment protection. The Ultrastar C10K600 is the only drive in its class to use a 64 MB cache, which is designed to efficiently manage data and optimize the drive's read/write response time.

The new Ultrastar drives also feature average seek times as low as 3.7 milliseconds and the fast rotational speeds reduce average latency time to 3.0 milliseconds, enabling customers to access data more quickly and efficiently.

Industry-Best Power Consumption

The Ultrastar C10K600 incorporates Advanced Power Management capabilities to achieve best-in-class power efficiency. The technology provides IT managers with multiple power mode options for achieving performance requirements with the lowest possible energy expenditure. The Advanced Power Management implementation in the Ultrastar C10K600 delivers an industry-leading random read/write operating power specification of 5.6 watts and idle mode of 3.1 watts.

The Ultrastar C10K600 uses halogen-reduced components to support the "green" computing initiatives that are of increasing importance in today's data centers. The drive has earned the Hitachi EcoTrac classification, used to describe products that minimize environmental impact in the areas of product design, manufacturing, operation and disposal.

Bulk Data Encryption

The new Ultrastar C10K600 drive family offers optional Bulk Data Encryption for hard-drive-level data security. These self-encrypting models are designed to the Trusted Computing Group's Enterprise A Security Subsystem Class encryption specification and allow customers to reduce costs associated with drive retirement and extend drive life by enabling swift and secure repurposing of drives.

Built for Reliability

The Ultrastar C10K600 is built on a mature and field-proven design platform to ensure greater reliability and reduced qualification times. The drive includes a host of industrial-strength technologies designed to maximize reliability in mission-critical environments. Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB) motors deliver a low acoustic rating and improved data integrity, while Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology anticipates and counteracts disturbances that can occur in multi-drive configurations. In addition, the Ultrastar C10K600 drive uses Hitachi-patented head load/unload technology to minimize integration induced drive damage.

The Ultrastar C10K600 is now shipping to customers worldwide, and has already been qualified by select OEMs.