Hitachi GST Ships 'First' 7200 rpm 2TB Enterprise-Class Hard Drives

Aug 13, 2009 14:58 Nikkei Electronics Asia

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) announced that it is now shipping what it claims is the industry's first enterprise-class, 7200 rpm 2-terabyte (2TB) offering, the Ultrastar A7K2000, made using the company's fourth-generation high-capacity hard drive technology.

The A7K2000 is designed, manufactured and tested to ensure enterprise-class mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) of 1.2 million hours in demanding 24 x 7 nearline applications. The drive is designed for use as an enterprise SATA drive for applications such as data warehousing, disk-to-disk backup, cloud computing and massive scale-out storage implementations where storage density, GB-per-watt and cost-per-GB are critical parameters.

At 2TB per drive, the A7K2000 has double the capacity of the prior generation A7K1000 drive in the same 3.5-inch form factor. The product can be easily integrated into new and existing storage systems. Implementing the company's rotational vibration safeguard (RVS) sensor technology, the SATA drive optimizes drive performance in multi-drive RAID arrays and rack-mounted systems.

Operating at 7200 rpm, the A7K2000 is claimed to offer better overall performance than slower-rpm, capacity-oriented drives, and does so at low power-consumption rates.

When compared to the company's previous generation product, the A7K2000 offers a 155% improvement in sustained data transfer rates, and a 120% improvement in watts-per-GB. With five advanced power management modes, a 36% reduction in watts during low rpm idle mode, and using less than 1W during standby/sleep modes, the A7K2000 can help data centers achieve lower AC power and HVAC requirements, freeing up precious headroom for growing enterprise needs.

The A7K2000 is available with a bulk data encryption (BDE) option. When enabled, the Hitachi BDE implementation encrypts all data on the drive using a private security key as it is written to the disk, and then decrypts it with the key as it is retrieved, giving users an extreme level of data protection. Unlike software-based encryption solutions, Hitachi's BDE implementation is hardware-based, so it won't slow the system down. The BDE also speeds up and simplifies the drive re-deployment and decommissioning process. By deleting the encryption key, the data is rendered unreadable, thereby eliminating the need for time-consuming, multi-pattern data overwrite.

24 Hours | 7 Days