Hitachi Unveils Compact Enterprise Hard Drive update from March 2009

Hitachi on Tuesday introduced a compact enterprise hard drive for rack-mounted servers and networked storage arrays.

The 10,000-rpm Ultrastar C10K300 is a 2.5-inch design offered in 147-GB and 300-GB capacities. The disk drive ships with a dual-port 6-Gbps Serial Attached SCSI, or SAS, interface.

The drives occupy 70% less physical space and consume 65% less power than a similar 3.5-inch drive, according to Hitachi. The Ultrastar C10K300 is the first Hitachi enterprise-class drive to include the company's power management technology that provides IT managers with multiple options for setting power modes. Such features were only available before with Hitachi's Deskstar line of products. The new drive consumes 3.4 watts at idle and 6.1 watts when active.

"Space constraints and low-power considerations in data centers have driven the transition to blade servers that rely on small-form-factor enterprise hard drives," Brendan Collins, VP of product marketing at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, said in a statement. "The Ultrastar C10K300 is positioned to capitalize on and accelerate this trend."

The drive has an average seek time as low as 3.9 milliseconds and an average latency time of 3 milliseconds, Hitachi said. Its overall speed and response time makes it well suited to a range of applications, such as online transaction processing, real-time business analytics, and delivery of data-intensive content on demand, such as multiple channels of streaming video.

The drive also includes technology to protect the drive against vibrations commonly found in multidrive configurations.

The Ultrastar C10K300 is available worldwide. Pricing wasn't disclosed.

Learn more about all the latest products and technologies at TechWeb's Interop Las Vegas, May 17-21. Join us (registration required).