We continue to report about the new products from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. The joint venture between IBM and Hitachi announced their third-generation, high-end enterprise hard disk drive - the 15000rpm Hitachi Ultrastar 15K73.

The Ultrastar 15K73 is available in both 36 and 73GB capacities and is aimed at SANs, NAS, RAID, data mining, audio-visual, server and other high-end markets. The drive's 1.2 million-MTBF specification meets the industry expectation for high reliability. The newcomer consumes rather typical 12W for SCSI HDDs.

Hitachi is able to achieve an areal density of 31Gb per square inch on the new Ultrastar through a combination of antiferromagnetically coupled (AFC) media and fluid dynamic bearing motors (FDB). The 15K73 is the industry's first 15K RPM hard drive to implement AFC media. The new drive's maximum sustained data transfer rate of 77.2 Mbytes/sec, combined with the high rotational speed, allows customers to access data more quickly and efficiently.

Here are some more technical specifications of the Ultrastar 15K73:

• Capacity: 73.9, 36.9 GB;
• Form factor: 3.5” in width, 1” in height;
• 15,037 rpm;
• Areal density of the platter: 31Gb per square inch;
• 5/3glass disk platter(s);
• 10/5 GMR recording head(s);
• 250 G/2ms non-operating shock;
• 15 G/11ms operating shock;
• 2ms average latency;
• 3.9ms average seek time;
• 960Mb/s maximum internal transfer rate;
• 77.2MB/s maximum sustained data transfer rate;
• Ultra 320 SCSI and 2 Gb FCAL;
• 750 weight in grams;
• 3.6Bels typical idle acoustics;
• 4.2Bels typical operating acoustics;

The Ultrastar 15K73 will be available in both Ultra 320 SCSI and 2Gb FCAL interfaces in the first quarter of 2003.