First HDD at Record 4TB by Hitachi GST

HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company) introduced the world’s first 4TB enterprise-class hard drive family, the Ultrastar 7K4000.

Ushering in a new generation of 512e Advanced Format drives, the Ultrastar 7K4000 family provides space-efficient, high-performance, low-power storage for traditional enterprises as well as for the big data and cloud/Internet markets where storage density, watt-per-gigabyte and cost-per-GB are critical parameters. Hungry for massive storage, cloud and Internet businesses are redefining the datacenter by designing new types of servers and storage architectures to help manage explosive petabyte growth. Critical to their datacenter infrastructure is the ability to scale and efficiently manage performance, power and storage space to help reduce TCO.

Capacity, Reliability, Performance and Low Power
The Ultrastar 7K4000 family addresses enterprise datacenter needs by offering reliability and a TCO value proposition like no other. As the only 4TB 7,200 RPM enterprise-class drive in the industry, and one with a 2.0 million MTBF specification, the Ultrastar family is a solution for 24×7 enterprise applications such as big data, cloud computing, data warehousing, video-on-demand, disk-to-disk backup, and massive scale-out storage implementations.

The 4TB Ultrastar 7K4000 drive delivers 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. It 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.

Designed for 24×7, capacity-optimized enterprise applications, HGST’s new Ultrastar 7K4000 drive family, which comes in 4TB, 3TB and 2TB capacities, is built upon technology proven for reliability, leveraging the system architecture and electronics of its predecessors. The Ultrastar 7K4000 family is the next generation of the Ultrastar 7K3000 series, which has been qualified at major enterprise storage OEMs worldwide, and is used in cloud and Internet datacenters around the world. The Ultrastar 7K4000 family is set to continue this standard with a five-year limited warranty and a 2.0 million hours MTBF specification, resulting in a 40 percent lower annualized failure rate (AFR) than enterprise drives rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF.

"Our cost-effective, high-density, and scalable enterprise-class storage solutions are designed for a broad range of market applications including cloud, digital video storage, and backup, and HGST’s high-capacity 7,200 RPM enterprise-class hard drives play a crucial role in our value proposition," said Gary Watson, CTO, Nexsan. "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, VP of product marketing, HGST. "With our new Advanced Format Ultrastar 7K4000 drives, we are providing enormous capacity earlier than otherwise possible for environments optimized for this technology, while delivering yet another offering that takes advantage of the Ultrastar family’s long-standing tradition of delivering high-reliability and low power for high-density cloud and big data applications."

Why HGST’s 7,200RPM enterprise-class HDDs
help keep TCO to a minimum:

1. Third-generation, field-proven Ultrastar design, with industry’s highest MTBF specification on a 7,200 RPM HDD to help reduce system downtime.
2. Easier integration and simplified product qualifications as a result of interoperability and compliance testing in HGST’s advanced Systems Integration Test Lab (SIT Lab).
3. Better GB per square foot and watts/GB when compared to its predecessor or 2.5-inch, capacity-optimized, 7,200 RPM enterprise hard drives.
4. Features a Dual Stage Actuator (DSA) and Enhanced Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) for performance in multi-drive environments.
5. Models are available with a bulk data encryption (BDE) option to help keep information safe.

The Ultrastar 7K4000 family features a 6Gb/s SATA interface and a 64MB cache buffer. It is an Advanced Format drive, using 4096-byte sector size, and is backward compatible with legacy 512-byte sector size by offering built-in 512-byte emulation through the SATA interface.

The new Ultrastar 7K4000 family is shipping in limited quantities. Customer samples are now available.