Industry-Leading Performance with Hitachi Ultrastar 10,000 RPM Hard Disk Drives

As organizations around the globe embrace increasingly data-intensive applications, they need high-performance storage devices to address their growing workload. Although 5400 RPM hard disk drives effectively handled most server storage tasks just a few years ago, they no longer provide the level of performance required by certain applications today. Even the latest generation of 7200 RPM hard disk drives can become bogged down by increased performance requirements. To more effectively support rapid, continuous data transfer for these new types of applications, organizations are turning to even faster hard disk drives that can read and write data at unheard-of speeds. These high- performance drives are capable of rotational speeds of 10,000 RPM and feature extremely rapid data transfer rates and seek times to help boost overall system performance.

The trade-offs of higher performance disk drives
Of all the mechanical characteristics associated with hard disk drives, rotational speed/RPM (disk movement) generally has the largest impact on performance gain. Because of this relationship, disk drive vendors have continued to increase rotational speed in order to improve both disk transfer rates and rotational latency (the time a read/write head must wait for a target sector on a disk to pass under it after the head has arrived at the target track). As a result, one of the easiest ways to improve the overall performance of a computer system has been to install a higher speed (higher RPM) hard disk drive.

In determining the benefits of higher speed hard disk drives, however, there are a variety of factors and trade-offs to consider. For instance, as the RPM rate increases, other operational characteristics of hard disk drives also tend to increase: noise, vibration, power requirements, and heat output. Each of these environmental factors can negatively impact total cost of ownership, usability, performance, and end-user productivity. In addition, each component of the hard disk drive must be optimized to ensure maximum performance--a feat that some hard disk drive vendors have had difficulty accomplishing.

The advantage of Hitachi Ultrastar 10,000 RPM drives
Not all vendors have experienced such complications, however. Hitachi has been especially effective at making tremendous hard disk drive performance improvements with consideration to the environmental factors that can easily make operation too expensive or impractical. While increasing rotational speed, Hitachi has carefully managed to minimize the impact of power consumption, vibration, and acoustics in order to make its drives ideal for operation in new systems or integration into existing systems.

In 1997, the 9.1 GB Ultrastar* 9ZX hard disk drive was released, the first 10,000 RPM drive. Within a year, the Ultrastar 9ZX had already received numerous industry awards for its superior performance and technology. In 1998, capitalizing on the success of the Ultrastar 9ZX, two new second-generation 10,000 RPM hard disk drives were released: the Ultrastar 9LZX and the Ultrastar 18ZX. These drives provide superior performance for workstation, subsystem, and enterprise server applications by leveraging much of the award- winning Ultrastar 9ZX technology: PRML data channel, thin film disks, advanced magnetoresistive extended (MRX) heads, No-ID* sector formatting, a powerful custom controller with hardware assist functions, and Drive- Temperature Indicator Processor (Drive-TIP*).