HGST announces 4TB disk drive

Big data needs big disk drivesHGST a division of Western Digital introduced the world’s first 4TB enterprise-class hard drive family. The company said it was the only 4TB 7,200 RPM enterprise-class drive in the industry and one with a 2.0 million hours mean time between failure¹ (MTBF) specification “The Ultrastar 7K4000 generation of 512e Advanced Format drives provides space-efficient, high-performance, low-power storage for traditional enterprises as well as for the explosive big data and cloud/Internet markets where storage density, watt-per-gigabyte and cost-per-GB are critical parameters,” it said. Other specifications include 33 percent more capacity in the same 3.5-inch footprint at 24 percent lower watts/GB than its predecessor, the 3TB Ultrastar 7K3000 drive. “Now IT managers can get 2.4 PBs in the footprint of a standard 19-inch storage rack by stacking ten 4U, 60-bay enclosures. The Ultrastar 7K4000 family can also help datacenters achieve lower AC power and HVAC requirements. With five Advanced Power Management modes, the Ultrastar 7K4000 achieves a 59 percent reduction in watts from peak usage during low RPM idle mode, and uses less than 1W during standby/sleep modes, freeing up precious headroom for growing datacenter needs. Ultrastar comes in 4TB, 3TB and 2TB capacities. Gary Watson, CTO, Nexsan, said: “We all know that the need for more storage is expanding in multiple directions and dimensions, and Hitachi’s highly reliable, high-capacity HDDs allow us to deliver solutions where large capacities, density, and power efficiency are highly valued. We have been using Hitachi Ultrastar drives for years and look forward to qualifying their new 4TB enterprise-class drives.” “We are humbled by the fact that our enterprise customers continue to appreciate and value our broad portfolio of enterprise HDDs and SDDs, which gives them multiple choices to satisfy a wide range of tiered storage requirements in the enterprise,“ said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST.