Hitachi's New HDDs A Blazing 15,000 RPM Fast

Hitachi's two new Ultrastar drives have blazing spindle speeds of 15,000 RPM.

On Tuesday, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies introduced new Ultrastar drives designed for enterprise storage applications. The drives come in two sizes, 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch, both offering blazing spindle speeds of 15,000 RPM and self-encryption. According to the company, each Ultrastar drive conforms to the Trusted Computing Group’s Enterprise A Security Subsystem Class specification "for ease of integration and implementation."

The Ultrastar C15K147 is the company's first 15,000 RPM, 2.5-inch 6 Gb/sec. Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drive, and boasts 70-percent more space efficiency compared to 3.5-inch enterprise hard rives. Hitachi said that the drive uses 50-percent less power than similar 3.5-inch Hitachi drives, and will be available in 73 GB and 147 GB capacities. The drive also uses the industry's largest cache buffer: a whopping 64 MB.

As for the 3.5-inch version, the 600 GB Ultrastar 15H600, this will be Hitachi's fourth generation 3.5-inch drive using either 6 Gb/sec. SAS or 4 Gb/sec. Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FCAL) interfaces, both of which use a 64 MB cache buffer. Outside the 600 GB model, consumers can also pick up a 300 GB or 450 GB version as well.

Hitachi said that the Ultrastar C15K147 and 15K600 drives are currently available, and include a five-year warranty.

These drives finally give customers an alternative 15K RPM drives that compete well with Seagate's Cheetah 15K7 drives released earlier this year.