SAN   JOSE,  Calif, January 29, 2013 – HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company, NASDAQ: WDC) today announced the industry’s highest-capacity 10,000 RPM, enterprise-class hard drive – the Ultrastar C10K1200.  Providing a capacity extension to HGST’s proven Ultrastar C10K900 product line, the new 2.5-inch Ultrastar C10K1200 features a SAS 6Gb/s interface for reliable data throughput, a 64MB cache buffer for optimized read/write response time, and a fast 10K rotational speed for reliable high-performance computing. All this, combined with the drive’s low power, high capacity and high performance attributes, results in higher density servers, blades and network storage arrays that helps reduce space requirements, lowers cooling costs and improves total cost of ownership (TCO).

Best Capacity-Performance for Mission Critical Applications

Increasing storage needs, shrinking floor space and budgets, and reducing power and cooling are just a few challenges that datacenter managers face today, making it challenging to scale and sustain business growth.  Whether building datacenters for public clouds, private clouds or traditional datacenters, adopting the right tiered storage strategy delivers greater efficiencies in terms of reliability, performance, capacity and power, and can make a vast difference in the ability to lower TCO.

As the only 1.2TB 10,000 RPM enterprise-class SAS hard drive in the industry, and one with a 2.0 million hours mean time between failure¹ (MTBF) specification, the Ultrastar C10K1200 is the ultimate solution for 24x7 enterprise applications such as data mining/analysis, business processing and timely delivery of data-intensive content-on-demand such as multiple channels of streaming video. For space and/or power constrained cloud or enterprise datacenter environments, the 1.2TB Ultrastar C10K1200 drive delivers 33 percent more capacity in the same 2.5-inch form factor, giving IT managers the ability to now store 28.8 TBs in a 2U, 24-bay rackmount server. The Ultrastar C10K1200 drive also helps datacenters achieve lower AC power and HVAC requirements. With HGST Advanced Power Management technology, with multi-state idle modes, the Ultrastar C10K1200 uses less than 5W during idle mode, freeing up precious headroom for growing datacenter needs.

Storage Tiering with 10K Performance HDDs

Every datacenter application has a specific set of capacity and performance requirements. Storage tiering helps place the right storage in the right place, balancing capacity, performance and cost. And contrary to popular belief, hard drives will retain their function for the foreseeable future as the primary form of storage from a cost and performance standpoint for large capacity, high-performance storage. The key to a sound tiering strategy is to identify where the highest performance is needed, then segment the Tier 0 and Tier 1 layers between enterprise-class SSDs and 10K RPM performance drives.

The Ultrastar C10K1200 is based on common Ultrastar C10K900 technologies to ensure greater reliability and reduced qualification times. Designed with the similar system architecture, HGST’s Ultrastar 10K performance HDDs are designed to be plug-compatible with Ultrastar solid state drives. This allows IT managers to easily swap an SSD with a 10K hard drive in order to effectively scale and tier applications, as SSDs provide the best IOPs/watt for reducing TCO, while 10K performance drives are more cost effective from a dollar-per-GB and capacity-performance perspective. A common HDD and SSD architecture also speeds up the drive qualification process and gives IT managers the ability to mix and match drives to ensure scale and flexibility for easier deployment, maintenance and upgrades.

The Ultrastar C10K1200 drive includes a host of industrial-strength technologies designed to maximize reliability for mission-critical workloads. Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB) motors deliver a low acoustic rating and improved data integrity, while Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology anticipates and counteracts disturbances that can occur in multi-drive configurations. In addition, the Ultrastar C10K1200 uses HGST-patented head load/unload ramp to minimize integration induced drive damage.

For added data security, select models of the Ultrastar C10K1200 offer Bulk Data Encryption for hard drive-level data security. These self-encrypting models are designed to the Trusted Computing Group’s Enterprise A Security Subsystem Class encryption specification and allow customers to reduce costs associated with drive retirement and extend drive life by enabling swift and secure repurposing of drives.

“We are pleased to be the first to ship server and storage systems using HGST’s new 1.2TB Ultrastar C10K1200 enterprise-class drives,” said Peter Korce, vice president and general manager, Dell Storage. “The new HGST drives complement our offerings, helping to deliver the performance, capacity, and reliability that customers have come to expect from our Dell PowerEdge® and PowerVault® solutions.”

Availability

The new 2.5-inch Ultrastar C10K1200 hard drive is shipping today, and has been qualified by select OEMs.