Hitachi Releases Hard Drives

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Poised to secure a stronger foothold in the enterprise hard drive market segment, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi), today announced a trio of new products: the 15K RPM Ultrastar 15K300, 7200 RPM Ultrastar A7K1000, and the company’s first small form factor (SFF) enterprise hard drive, the 10K RPM Ultrastar C10K147. Hitachi’s new hard drives target a broad range of enterprise storage systems, from mission-critical and lower duty cycle storage applications to servers, delivering the quality and reliability customers have come to expect from Hitachi’s Ultrastar enterprise-class hard drives.

Expanded enterprise segment participation is a key element of Hitachi’s plan for business excellence as the segment continues to experience consistent growth and drive technology innovation that can be leveraged across other Hitachi products. Delivering a new portfolio of enterprise hard drives in 2007 helps support Hitachi’s profitability initiatives and places the company in a strong position to achieve its goal of 25 percent year-to-year volume growth in enterprise.

Accelerating the Transition to Small Form Factor

A key new product in Hitachi’s enterprise product portfolio is the Ultrastar C10K147, the company’s first small form factor enterprise hard drive. The Ultrastar C10K147 was developed specifically for the high performance, low power requirements of servers. According to IDC, the industry is expected to experience a fast ramp in shipments from 2.4 million in 2006 to 9.4 million in 2007 as cost, space and low power considerations in data centers drive the need for a transition to SFF. The delivery of the Ultrastar C10K147 is timed to capitalize on and accelerate this increasing demand.

As businesses and their IT organizations experience the transition to an all-digital world – voice, images and video – the requirement to capture, store and access such data increases exponentially. This information is replicated over and over on the Internet, in servers and in data centers – all on the backbone of enterprise hard drives. Hitachi’s broad product portfolio allows enterprise customers to create infrastructures with the optimal mix of hard drives that address the performance, power, capacity and cost parameters for the varying storage and data-access requirements that exist in the storage hierarchy.

Platforms Built for Reliability

Hitachi’s new Ultrastar hard drives are built upon technology proven for reliability, leveraging the system architecture and electronics of their predecessors. The 15K300 is the next generation of the popular 15K147, which has been qualified at major enterprise storage OEMs. The Ultrastar A7K1000 represents the next generation of the Deskstar E7K500, which has become the most popular hard drive for Enterprise SATA applications, with demonstrated reliability in the field. It is set to continue that reliability standard with a targeted 1.2 million hours mean time between failure1 (MTBF).

“The enterprise market segment is an extremely important business for Hitachi. Our customers are providing the critical storage infrastructure that supports end-users’ ability to create, store and share digital content,” said Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing officer, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. “Our OEM customers have identified our products as setting the standard for quality, and building on this successful track record, our 2007 product portfolio helps position Hitachi to further expand our enterprise segment participation and achieve our volume-growth targets.”

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST)0