A high-ranking source familiar with the plans of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies said the company had plans to release new breed of HDDs he referred as 'Serial ATA-II' hard disk drives already this year, ahead of some of its rivals.

Serial ATA II is an improvement of the original Serial ATA technology that adds higher interface bandwidth along with capabilities like native command queuing, support for Serial ATA port multiplier and port selector technology. In addition the new Serial ATA II HDDs will be able to be plugged and unplugged while system’s operation, which is important for mission-critical servers.

A representative for Hitachi Global Storage Division told X-bit labs, “As a matter of company policy, Hitachi GST does not comment on unannounced products.”

The first chipset company to support advanced Serial ATA II, that is sometimes referred as Serial ATA-300 – only a partly correct statement, capabilities is NVIDIA Corp., who claims it to have mainboards running its latest nForce4 core-logic in retail by late November, 2004. Serial ATA II standard is also supported by makers of RAID controllers, such as HighPoint, LSI Logic and Silicon Image.

Earlier this year a number of companies, including Maxtor and Samsung Electronics, initiated production of hard disk drives that utilized technologies originally expected to emerge only along with Serial ATA II.

Product details about Hitachi GST’s Serial ATA II products are unknown.