Hitachi claims reliability breakthrough with 3TB enterprise drive

Hitachi has updated its Ultrastar range with its first 7,200rpm 3TB enterprise-class drives, which the company said will deliver greater reliability in datacentre environments and save on energy costs at the same time.

Shipping now, the 3.5in Ultrastar 7K3000 line is claimed by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies as the world’s first 7,200rpm, 3TB enterprise-class hard drive, a storage density that allows customers to cram up to 1.8PB into a standard 19in datacentre rack.

Hitachi is also pushing reliability with the new drives, stating that it has increased the mean time before failure to two million hours, resulting in an average failure rate 40 per cent lower than the industry average.

"Over a five-year period, that mean time before failure equates to an improvement of about 40 per cent, which enterprise customers will see as a big improvement in total cost of ownership as it can cost several hundred pounds to replace a drive like this in the field," said Hitachi's EMEA vice president Steve Perrera.

The new drives are built and tested to the same standards as Hitachi's 10,000rpm enterprise-class products, which makes them suitable for inclusion in tiered storage architectures alongside the faster drives, according to Hitachi.

Such a deployment would typically see Ultrastar 7K3000 drives used in lower tiers, with the costlier 10,000rpm and solid state drives holding more frequently accessed information.

Perrera said that the storage density of the new drives means that datacentres could save energy by delivering the same level of storage using fewer drives.

"The 3TB capacity means 32 per cent lower watts per gigabyte when compared with 2.5in 7,200rpm drives," he said.

The Ultrastar 7K3000 are also Hitachi's first 7,200rpm drives available with 6Gbit/s Serial ATA and 6Gbit/s serial-attached SCSI host interfaces, although the latter is not due until the middle of this year.

Pricing for the new drives has yet to be disclosed.