Hitachi HHDs target data centres

HITACHI HAS ANNOUNCED a new addidtion to its hard drive line up in the shape of the Ultrastar C10K300 which the Japanese electronics giant hopes will find its way into rack-mounted storage arrays in giant data centres.

The 10,000 RPM drives have a low-profile 2.5-inch design, more often seen in laptops, taking up 70 per cent less space and using 65 per cent less power than standard 3.5 inch enterprise drives.

Offered in 147GB and 300GB flavours, they use an SAS (serial attached SCSI) interface to deliver 6Gb per second data rates and are supposedly the first enterprise-class drives to come with advanced power management capabilities. Idle power is reported at 3.4 watts and the drives draw 6.1 watts in active operation.

Fluid dynamic bearings keep the drive reasonably quiet at 29dB and platters spining at 10,000 RPM allow minimum seek times of 3.9 milliseconds with an average latency of three milliseconds. µ