Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) is now shipping its new Ultrastar C10K900 enterprise drive family.

HGST claims that the new 2.5-inch Ultrastar C10K900 leads the industry with 18 percent faster sequential and up to 17 percent faster random performance than the nearest competitor. It also features a SAS 6Gb/s interface and packs a 64MB cache buffer to optimize the read/write response time. The new Ultrastar drives feature average seek times as low as 3.8 milliseconds, and its fast rotational speed reduces average latency time to below 3.0 milliseconds.

As the company?s fourth-generation, small form factor enterprise hard drive, the Ultrastar C10K900 also hits the industry?s highest 10K capacity point at 900GB. The new Ultrastar C10K900 family is available in 900GB, 600GB, 450GB and 300GB capacities.

Hitachi Advanced Power Management technology, with multi-state idle modes, maintains compatibility with the INCITS T10 Technical Committee industry standards and can be pre-programmed or manually initiated in the system. The Advanced Power Management implementation in the Ultrastar C10K900 delivers random read/write operating power specification of 5.8 watts and idle mode of 3.0 watts.

The Ultrastar C10K900 family features a Bulk Data Encryption option for hard drive-level data security. These self-encrypting models are designed to the Trusted Computing Group?s Enterprise A Security Subsystem Class encryption specification and allow consumers to reduce costs associated with drive retirement and extend drive life by enabling swift and secure repurposing of drives.

Hitachi GST is now shipping Ultrastar C10K900 qualification units with volume shipments in Q1 2012.