Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) on Monday unveiled the industry’s highest capacity hard disk drive (HDD) aimed at enterprise customers. The Ultrastar A7K2000 boasts the same technical characteristics as similar Deskstar HDD launched last week, but features a number of enhancements needed for enterprise customers.

“With the addition of the A7K2000, Hitachi GST continues to provide one of the broadest ranges of enterprise storage products in the world—from premium, enterprise-class, capacity-optimized SATA drives to performance oriented 10 000 and 15 000 RPM drives – ideal for virtually every aspect of storage in the data center,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of marketing at Hitachi GST.

The new Hitachi GST Ultrastar A7K2000 is designed, manufactured and tested to ensure enterprise-class mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) of 1.2 million hours in demanding 24x7 nearline applications, according to the manufacturer. Hitachi provides five years limited warranty on its Ultrastar drives. According to Hitachi, usage of five-platter design is an advantage since thanks to relaxed bit density and proven perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology it features improved reliability.

Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 hard drive with 2TB capacity is based on five 400GB platters with 36.5GB areal density (per square inch), features 32MB data buffer, 7200rpm spindle speed, Serial ATA-300 interface. Hitachi declares 8.2ms typical read seek time for the novelty. The company claims that the A7K2000 consumes about 11.1W under maximum load, but features five Advanced Power Management modes, can reduce power consumption by 36% during low RPM idle mode, and uses less than 1W during standby/sleep modes. The Ultrastar A7K2000 features 3.5” form-factor and is aimed at enterprise computers, including workstations and data storage systems. For servers Hitachi offers Ultrastar drives with 10 000rpm or even 15 000rpm spindle speed.

Ultrastar Serial ATA drives feature Hitachi’s patented Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) sensor technology, which optimizes drive performance in multi-drive RAID arrays and rack-mounted systems.

The Ultrastar A7K2000 is also 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 and the company claims that it will not slow the system down.

The 2TB Ultrastar A7K2000 is now available worldwide with a five-year warranty. 500GB and 1TB versions of the drive will begin shipping in the current quarter.

Tags: Hitachi