Advertisment

Hitachi GST Raises the 'Reliability' Bar for 7,200 RPM, 3.5-inch Enterprise Drives

author-image
PCQ Bureau
New Update

Committed to the growing market for cost-effective, capacity-optimized drives, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) introduced its new enterprise-class, 3.5-inch, 3TB Ultrastar 7K3000 drive family — the world's first and only 7,200 RPM drive family rated at 2.0 million hours MTBF and backed by a five-year limited warranty. The new Ultrastar 7K3000 drive family represents the fifth-generation of Hitachi's five-platter mechanical design, which has been stringently designed, tested and field proven for quality and reliability by global server and storage OEMs, as well as the most well known Internet giants worldwide. With millions of five-platter Ultrastar drives shipped over the last three years, Hitachi's field reliability data shows an unprecedented AFR below 0.40 percent, exceeding customer and industry AFR quality specifications for a 7,200 RPM drive. By increasing the MTBF specification to 2.0 million hours, with an AFR 40 percent lower than drives rated 1.2 million hours MTBF, Hitachi enables data center managers to expect reduced failures, improved up-time and lowered TCO when using a large population of Ultrastar 7K3000 hard drives over a period of time.

Advertisment

"From early-stage research to design and development to component selection and manufacturing, we have multi-layer processes in place to ensure that our customers receive the highest quality products throughout the entire life of the hard drive program," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at Hitachi GST. “Raising our MTBF to 2.0 million hours on our new Ultrastar 7K3000 family reinforces this quality commitment. Our new Ultrastar drives will continue to play an important and growing role in data centers that require 24x7 availability for cloud storage, massive scale out (MSO) data farms, data warehousing, disk-to-disk backup, RAID arrays and more.”

Keeping TCO to a minimum

With the industry's highest MTBF on a 7,200 RPM HDD, and stringent quality standards in place, the Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 family delivers by reducing system downtime, eliminating service calls and keeping TCO to a minimum. With explosive petabyte (PB) growth requirements, IT managers can also leverage the new 3TB Ultrastar 7K3000 drive's low power, high capacity and lower cost per gigabyte to optimize floor space and improve power-density requirements, ultimately helping to take pressure off of shrinking data centers and budgets.

Hitachi's 3.5-inch Ultrastar 7K3000 capacity density also allows better utilization of floor space in terms of GB per square foot (GB/sq ft.) and watts/GB when compared to 2.5-inch, capacity-optimized, 7,200 RPM enterprise hard drives. Today these 2.5-inch drives cost roughly twice the dollars per GB ($/GB) of 3TB, 3.5-inch 7,200 RPM drives with 66 percent less capacity. To reach the same capacity as a 3TB, 3.5-inch Ultrastar 7K3000 drive, customers would have to purchase three 1TB 2.5-inch 7,200 RPM drives, which will consume up to 170 percent higher watts to power the drives and will occupy three times the storage array slots.

The new Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 family comes in 3TB and 2TB offerings, and is now shipping with a 6Gb/s SATA interface worldwide. The Ultrastar 7K3000 6Gb/s SAS family will be available in mid-2011.

Advertisment