Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced
that it has begun shipping Ultrastar 15K147 hard drives with Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and 4 Gb/s
Fibre Channel (4GFC) interfaces.
SAS is a next-generation serial interface designed to extend the
capabilities of today's parallel SCSI drives.
The Ultrastar 15K147 is Hitachi's highest-performer, delivering average seek times as fast as 3.3 ms,
average latency of 2 ms and as much as 33 percent more I/Os per second compared to 10,000 RPM
products. The drive is suited for use in mission-critical enterprise computing
environments, such as online transaction processing, data analysis and other multi-user applications.
The new drives are available in 36, 73 and 147 GB capacities and feature large, 16 MB cache sizes to
minimize command overhead and improve average read/write response times. Hitachi will continue to
offer the Ultrastar 15K147 with Ultra320 SCSI for customers using parallel-based storage systems.
A key benefit of SAS is that it can coexist with Serial ATA (SATA) within a single storage enclosure,
using common backplanes, connectors and cabling.
SAS supports data transfer rates of up to 3 Gb/s and full duplex, point-to-point connections so that
each drive has a dedicated connection to the host. While parallel SCSI limited users to 15 drives per
controller, SAS architecture supports up to 16,384 connections for much greater scalability.
The interface standard allows for a data transfer rate of up to 400
MB/s half-duplex and up to 800 MB/s full-duplex, per port. The higher performance 4GFC interface is
fully backward compatible with 2 Gb/s and 1 Gb/s hardware.
Hitachi's Ultrastar 15K147 drives meet the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) compliance
directive recently issued by the European Union (EU). The EU directive requires electronics
manufacturers to significantly reduce lead and other selected content from their products by August
2006. Hitachi recently announced that all Hitachi hard drive products introduced in 2005 and beyond will
be RoHS compliant.
Hitachi will begin shipping Ultrastar 15K147 drives with SAS and 4GFC interfaces this month and will
be in full volume production by the end of July.
Technical Specifications
Ultrastar 15K147
147 / 73 / 36 GB (GB equals one billion bytes when referring to hard drive capacity; accessible capacity
may be less)
1" in height
15,000 rpm
61.7 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
5 / 3 / 2 glass disk platter(s)
10 / 5 / 3 GMR recording head(s)
250 G/ 2 ms non-operating shock,
15 G/ 11 ms operating shock
2 ms average latency
3.7 / 3.6 / 3.3 ms average seek time
1,129 Mb/s maximum internal transfer rate
93.3 MB/s maximum sustained data transfer rate
Ultra 320 SCSI, SAS and 4GFC
758 / 741/ 736 weight in grams
3.5 Bels typical idle acoustics
4.6 Bels typical operating acoustics