Fujitsu announces new enterprise hard drives

IDG News Service - Fujitsu Ltd. today announced two new additions to its lineup of enterprise hard disk drives.
Its MAT family of drives, expected to be commercially available from the third quarter of this year, have a rotation speed of 10,000 rpm and will be available in capacities of 73GB, 147GB and 300GB, said Joel Hagberg, vice president of marketing at Fujitsu Computer Products of America.
The company's announcement comes about a week after rival Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. became the first drive maker to announce a 300GB, 10,000-rpm drive.
Fujitsu said its drive has an advantage over the Hitachi model because it uses four disk platters compared to the five used by Hitachi. Fujitsu can get away with using one less platter because it uses a more advanced technology that crams data closer together: 75GB/sq. in., compared with Hitachi's 61GB/sq. in.
"It means lower power consumption, because turning five platters is a 20% increase in mass," said Hagberg. "Also, a lower power consumption means less heat is generated so the drive runs cooler, and that will help all components in a system and help reliability. With the higher density, you should also see a higher data rate because you have potentially 20% more bits on a track."
The average read seek time for the Fujitsu drive is 4.5 milliseconds, compared with 4.7 milliseconds for the Hitachi drive.
Fujitsu's second new disk family, the MAU series, is expected to be available a few months following the MAT drives. MAU disks will run at 15,000 rpm, and they will be available in capacities of 36GB, 73GB and 147GB, said Hagberg. The average read seek time for those drives is 3.2 milliseconds.
Both MAT and MAU drives will be available in Ultra 320 SCSI or 2Gbit/sec. Fiber Channel interface versions. Pricing has not yet been announced.