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.

The Ultrastar 15K450 is a performance leader, with Hitachi tests indicating a 30 percent improvement in sequential throughput over its predecessor. The drive features average seek times as low as 3.3 milliseconds and the fast rotational speeds reduce average latency time to 2 milliseconds, enabling customers to access data more quickly and efficiently. The new drive will ship with either 3Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or 4Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces.

The Ultrastar 15K450, which is built on a mature design platform to ensure greater reliability and reduced qualification times, offers a host of industrial-strength technology for proven reliability in mission-critical, server-class environments. Technologies such as fluid dynamic bearing motors deliver a low acoustic rating and improved data integrity, and Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology anticipates disturbances that can occur in multi-drive configurations and counteracts them. In addition, the Ultrastar 15K450 uses Hitachi's patented head load/unload ramp to minimize integration induced drive damage.

"With the higher capacity and performance of the Ultrastar 15K450, enterprises are able to address their throughput requirements using fewer drives, which reduces three things; the cost of ownership, the datacenter's footprint and overall power requirements," said Dean Amini, director, Enterprise Market & Strategy, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "Coupled with our intensive testing and quality assurance process, the Ultrastar 15K450 offers the highest available performance and reliability for mission-critical computing environments."

The Ultrastar 15K450 will be shipping this quarter to customers worldwide.

Technical Specifications:
Ultrastar 15K450

• 450GB (GB = 1 billion bytes, accessible capacity may be less)
• 183 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
• 4 platters, 8 recording heads
• 2090 Mb/s max. media data rate
• 3.6 ms average seek time (with command overhead)
• 15,000 RPM, 2.0 ms average latency
• 3Gb/s SAS, 4Gb/s FCAL interfaces
• 16 MB data buffer
• 25.8 mm in height (max)
• 750 in weight (max)
• 250 G/2 ms pulse non-operating shock
• SAS: 13.3 watt idle power
• FCAL: 13.4 watt idle power
• 3.7 Bels typical idle acoustics
• 5 to 55 degrees C operating temperature