IT-Review

Hitachi And HP Offer 300GB Hard Drives

HP will offer the Hitachi Ultrastar 10K300 Fibre Channel drive in the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) and the Ultrastar 10K300 SCSI drive in industry-standard HP ProLiant servers and the HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) family. The Ultrastar 10K300 offers a valuable combination of capacity, reliability and ease of integration.

With the new 300 GB Fibre Channel drives, HP doubles the high-performance data storage capability of the midrange StorageWorks EVA to a raw capacity of 70 terabytes. With the massively expanded capacity of the HP StorageWorks EVA family, customers can continue to benefit from the system's ease-of-management as more information is digitized and retained.

The Hitachi Ultrastar 10K300 is built on a proven drive design with demonstrated enterprise class reliability and product quality. The new 3.5-inch drives satisfy the requirements of mission-critical storage applications such as online transaction processing, data analysis and media streaming. The Ultrastar 10K300 features capacities of 73, 147 and 300GB and a 10,000 RPM rotational speed.

The TechReport runs an in-depth review of the Hitachi Ultrastar 10K300 HDD-drives:

Like the Atlas 10K V, the Ultrastar 10K300 is available in 73, 147, and 300GB capacities with 73GB per platter. The drive has 8MB of cache, which is common for SCSI drives, but seems a little spartan considering that the latest crop of desktop Serial ATA drives are sporting 16MB.

Although it's largely matched the Atlas 10K V thus far, the Ultrastar 10K300's 1.2 million hour Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) rating trails the Maxtor drive by 200,000 hours. However, 1.2 million hours translates to well over 100 years, which goes far beyond the drive's five-year warranty. Five-year warranties are pretty standard in the SCSI world, but with Seagate bumping the warranty period for its desktop drives up to five years, I can't help but wonder if SCSI storage is due for a warranty boost.