Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, a leading designer of hard disk drives, on Thursday unveiled the world’s first hard disk drive (HDDs) for enterprises with 15000rpm spindle speed and 450GB capacity. Hitachi believes that the new Ultrastar 15K450 drive also offers unprecedented performance.

Hitachi Ultrastar 15K450 with 450GB capacity, 16MB cache and 15K rpm spindle speed is based on four 112.5GB platters and declares average seek time of 3.6ms as well as average latency time of 2ms. The new drive will ship with either 3Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or 4Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces. Hitachi declares 30% performance improvement over predecessor.

“The Ultrastar 15K450 is an ideal solution for mission-critical server and storage applications, such as online transaction processing, intensive database queries and other multi-user applications,” a statement by Hitachi reads.

The new enterprise-class Ultrastar 15K450 drive from Hitachi sports such technologies as fluid dynamic bearing motors that deliver a low acoustic rating and improved data integrity, and Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology which anticipates disturbances that can occur in multi-drive configurations and counteracts them. In addition, the Ultrastar 15K450 uses Hitachi’s patented head load/unload ramp to minimize integration induced drive damage.

The Ultrastar 15K450 will be shipping this quarter to customers worldwide.

“With the higher capacity and performance of the Ultrastar 15K450, enterprises are able to address their throughput requirements using fewer drives, which reduces three things; the cost of ownership, the datacenter’s footprint and overall power requirements. Coupled with our intensive testing and quality assurance process, the Ultrastar 15K450 offers the highest available performance and reliability for mission-critical computing environments,” said Dean Amini, director or enterprise market and strategy, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.