HGST today announced a new range of hard drives, offering enterprise class storage with 4TB capacities.
The company which used to be part of Hitachi but was bought out by Western Digital in March this year claimed the Ultrastar 7K4000 portfolio would bring the largest capacity hard drives available to the enterprise, helping companies deal with the data deluge they are facing today.
Despite a 33 per cent rise in capacity over its previous drive the 3TB Ultrastar 7K3000 the Ultrastar 7K4000 is the same size, 3.5in. HGST claims it even lowers the watts per GB needed by 24 per cent.
By offering an extra TB of storage in the same casing, companies can achieve 2.4PBs of capacity in a standard 19in storage rack with 60 bay enclosures. This saves an enterprise time, space and power.
The Ultrastar 7K4000 still spins at the same speed of its predecessor as well, recording 7,200 RPM,and features a 6Gbps SATA interface and a 64MB cache.
It also features an option for bulk data encryption (BDE), enabling enterprises to put security in place for huge amounts of storage in one fell swoop.
Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at HGST, claimed to be "humbled" by enterprises that were sticking with HGST products but believed they would see the benefits for their loyalty.
"With our new Advanced Format Ultrastar 7K4000 drives, we are providing enormous capacity earlier than otherwise possible for environments optimised 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," he said.
This is the largest capacity hard drive available, with only Seagate providing 4TB too. However, the rival firm only offers the 4TB as an external drive, rather than fitting within enterprise level storage like the HGST Ultrastar 7K4000.
HGST said the new range is shipping in limited quantities now, with customer samples also available.
