HGST, now a Western Digital company, today introduced the first 4TB enterprise-class hard drive family, the Ultrastar 7K4000.

Ushering in a new generation of 512e Advanced Format drives, the Ultrastar 7K4000 family provides space-efficient, high-performance, low-power storage. As the only 4TB 7,200 RPM enterprise-class drive in the industry, and one with a 2.0 million hours mean time between failure (MTBF) specification, the Ultrastar family is aimed at 24x7 enterprise applications such as big data, cloud computing, data warehousing, video-on-demand, disk-to-disk backup, and massive scale-out storage implementations.

The 4TB Ultrastar 7K4000 drive delivers 33 percent more capacity in the same 3.5-inch footprint at 24 percent lower watts/GB than its predecessor, the 3TB Ultrastar 7K3000 drive. Now IT managers can get 2.4 PBs in the footprint of a standard 19-inch storage rack by stacking ten 4U, 60-bay enclosures. The Ultrastar 7K4000 family can also help datacenters achieve lower AC power and HVAC requirements. With five Advanced Power Management modes, the Ultrastar 7K4000 achieves a 59 percent reduction in watts from peak usage during low RPM idle mode, and uses less than 1W during standby/sleep modes.

The Ultrastar 7K4000 family features a 6Gb/s SATA interface and a 64MB cache buffer. It is an Advanced Format drive, using 4096-byte sector size, and is backward compatible with legacy 512-byte sector size by offering built-in 512-byte emulation through the SATA interface.

Other features include a Dual Stage Actuator (DSA) and Enhanced Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) and a bulk data encryption (BDE) option to help keep information safe.

HGST?s new 7,200 RPM Ultrastar 7K4000 drive family, which comes in 4TB, 3TB and 2TB capacities, is covered by a five-year limited warranty.

HGST is now shipping the new drives in limited quantities.