Hitachi launch 4TB enterprise hard drives

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (now a Western Digital company) today introduced the world’s first 4 TB enterprise-class hard drive family, the Ultrastar 7K4000. The Ultrastar 7K4000 family provides space-efficient, high-performance, low-power storage for traditional enterprises as well as for the big data and cloud/Internet markets where storage density, watt-per-gigabyte and cost-per-GB are critical parameters. The new Ultrastar 7K4000 family addresses enterprise datacenter needs by offering high reliability and a TCO value proposition like no other. As the only 4 TB 7,200 RPM enterprise-class drive in the industry, and one with a 2.0 million hours mean time between failure (MTBF) specification, the Ultrastar family is the ultimate solution for 24×7 enterprise applications such as big data, cloud computing, data warehousing, video-on-demand, disk-to-disk backup, and massive scale-out storage implementations.

The 4 TB Ultrastar 7K4000 drive delivers 33 percent more capacity in the same 3.5-inch footprint at 24 percent lower watts/GB than its predecessor, the 3 TB Ultrastar 7K3000 drive. Now IT managers can get 2.4 PBs in the footprint of a standard 19-inch storage rack by stacking ten 4U, 60-bay enclosures. The Ultrastar 7K4000 family can also help datacenters achieve lower AC power and HVAC requirements. With five Advanced Power Management modes, the Ultrastar 7K4000 achieves a 59 percent reduction in watts from peak usage during low RPM idle mode, and uses less than 1W during standby/sleep modes, freeing up precious headroom for growing datacenter needs.

Designed for 24×7, capacity-optimized enterprise applications, HGST’s new Ultrastar 7K4000 drive family, which comes in 4 TB, 3 TB and 2 TB capacities, is built upon technology proven for reliability, leveraging the system architecture and electronics of its predecessors. The Ultrastar 7K4000 family is the next generation of the Ultrastar 7K3000 series, which has been qualified at major enterprise storage OEMs worldwide, and is used in cloud and Internet datacenters around the world. The 7,200 RPM Ultrastar family is one of the most popular high-capacity hard drives for enterprise applications, with demonstrated field reliability. The Ultrastar 7K4000 family is set to continue this standard with a five-year limited warranty and a 2.0 million hours MTBF specification, resulting in a 40 percent lower annualized failure rate (AFR) than enterprise drives rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF.

The Ultrastar 7K4000 family features a 6 Gb/s SATA interface and a 64 MB cache buffer. It is an Advanced Format drive, using 4096-byte sector size, and is backward compatible with legacy 512-byte sector size by offering built-in 512-byte emulation through the SATA interface.The new Ultrastar 7K4000 family is now shipping in limited quantities. Customer samples are now available.

Source: PR