Hitachi GST leads 3TB enterprise drive pack

Hitachi GST has announced the highest capacity large enterprise drive at 3TB. The Ultrastar 7K3000 spins at 7,200rpm with a two million hour mean time before failure rating, the industry’s highest MTBF on a 7200rpm HDD. It has five platters and sports both SAS and SATA interface options at 6Gbit/s, another first. There is a …

[Ammaross Danan]

Marketing Fail?

"To reach the same capacity as a 3TB, 3.5-inch... 7K3000 drive, customers would have to purchase three 1TB 2.5-inch 7,200 RPM drives, which will consume up to 170 per cent higher watts to power the drives and will occupy three times the storage array slots“. It says there is a 32 per cent reduction in watts/GB versus Hitachi’s prior generation 2TB A7K2000 drives."

So....get 1x3.5" with 3TB, 3x2.5" 1TBs (which should have no comparison btw, since they use different bays), or simply get 2x3.5"s of the "prior generation" to get 4TB instead of just 3.... Sure, you lose a bit on the power savings and the 6gbps SATA/SAS, but I'm sure those drives just became cheaper....

[Phil Koenig]

Vaporware so far

What matters is not who announces what when, but who actually _delivers product_ and on what date.

Seagate and others have plenty of time to leapfrog HGST on those items not scheduled to ship for another half-year.