Hitachi's 2TB 7200RPM Ultrastar A7K2000 Aims For Enterprise

Surely you remember Hitachi's foray into the wide, speedy world of 2TB 7200RPM hard drives, right? Considering that it was less than a week ago, we sure hope so! Now, the company is looking to capitalize on the high-margin enterprise world with the announcement of its strikingly similar Ultrastar A7K2000.

Hailed as the industry's first 7200RPM 2TB "enterprise-class" hard drive, this unit is designed, manufactured and tested to ensure enterprise-class mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) of 1.2 million hours in demanding 24x7 nearline applications. Hitachi claims that it is the ideal enterprise SATA drive for applications such as data warehousing, disk-to-disk backup, cloud computing and massive scale-out storage implementations where storage density, GB-per-watt and cost-per-GB are critical parameters.

Further pushing the corporate speak, the company asserts that the unit features its patented Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) sensor technology, which optimizes drive performance in multi-drive RAID arrays and rack-mounted systems. Also of note, the five-year warranty sure keep business owners from sweating at night. Speaking of performance, the A7K2000 offers a 155 percent improvement in sustained data transfer rates and a 120 percent improvement in watts-per-GB when compared to the company's previous generation Ultrastar A7K1000. There are also five Advanced Power Management modes, which provide a 36% reduction in watts during low RPM idle mode, and use less than 1 watt during standby/sleep modes.


Hitachi tells us that the 2TB version is available now for an undisclosed amount, with a 500GB and 1TB version expected to begin shipping later in the current quarter.