Hitachi has announced that the first 3TB enterprise hard drive, the Ultrastar 7K3000 is now shipping. The 3.5" 7K3000 features a 7200RPM spindle speed and SATA 6Gb/s interface – a SAS version will ship in mid-2011. While the 3TB capacity for the enterprise may appear to be the headline, there’s one other interesting spec and that’s the 2 million hour MTBF, a 67% increase over what’s claimed by most other enterprise drives. This translates into a 40% lower annualized failure rate than drives rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF.
Hitachi has announced that the first 3TB enterprise hard drive, the Ultrastar 7K3000 is now shipping. The 3.5" 7K3000 features a 7200RPM spindle speed and SATA 6Gb/s interface – a SAS version will ship in mid-2011. While the 3TB capacity for the enterprise may appear to be the headline, there’s one other interesting spec and that’s the 2 million hour MTBF, a 67% increase over what’s claimed by most other enterprise drives. This translates into a 40% lower annualized failure rate than drives rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF.
Ultrastar 7K3000 Specs
- Interface – SATA 6Gb/s and SAS 6Gb/s
- Capacity – 3TB / 2TB
- Sector size – SATA – 512, SAS – 512 / 520 / 528
- Max areal density (Gbits/sq. in.) – 369 / 360
- Data buffer – 64MB
- Rotational Speed – 7200RPM
- Sustained transfer rate (MB/sec, typ.) – 152
- Error Rate (non-recoverable, bits read) – 1 in 1015
- MTBF (M hours) – 2.0
- Load/Unload Cycles – 600,000
- Seek (Bels, typical) – 2.9
- Requirement: Start-up (W, peak, max) 2.4 (+12V), 4.5 (+5V)
- Requirement: Read/Write (W, avg) 11.3 12.3
- Unload idle (W) 5.6 6.6
The Ultrastar 7K3000 drive family represents the fifth-generation of Hitachi’s five-platter design. The longevity of this platform allows Hitachi to increase the MTBF claim and lets them focus their pitch on lower total cost of ownership due to fewer drive failures. Hitachi increased their reliability numbers after years of field use indicated their drives were lasting much longer than anticipated. The MTBF increase can’t be marketing hype either – if drives fail within that window, warranty expense will rocket.
The 7K3000 also delivers 50% more capacity in the same footprint and does so at a 32% reduction in watts/GB versus Hitachi’s prior generation Ultrastar A7K2000 drives. This translates to 1.8PB of total storage in the footprint of a standard rack by stacking 10 4U, 60-bay enclosures.
The Ultrastar 7K3000 SATA and SAS models are available with a bulk data encryption (BDE) options. While the Ultrastar 7K3000 SATA model uses proprietary Hitachi encryption, the Ultrastar 7K3000 dual-port SAS model is targeted at 6Gb/s SAS enterprise infrastructures and is designed to meet the industry standard TCG Enterprise_A encryption specification.
Availability
The Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 family comes in 3TB and 2TB capacities, and is now shipping with a 6Gb/s SATA interface; the 6Gb/s SAS family will be available in mid-2011.
