Hitachi launched its new enterprise-class, 3.5-inch, 3 TeraByte (TB) Ultrastar 7K3000 hard disk drive (HDD) family, which it claims is the world's first and only 7,200 revolutions per minute (RPM) drive rated at 2.0 million hours mean time between failure (MTBF).

RPM is used as a measure of rotational speed of a mechanical component such as hard drives. The higher the RPM, the faster the data can be read from the platters, thereby boosting overall performance.

Tokyo-based Hitachi said its new Ultrastar 7K3000 drive family is the first 7,200 RPM enterprise-class HDD to deliver 2.0 million hours mean time between failure (MTBF), resulting in a 40 percent lower annualized failure rate (AFR) than enterprise drives rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF.

The Ultrastar 7K3000 hard drives are available in both 6 gigabits per second (6Gb/s) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA) interfaces.

SATA or (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) and SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) are computer bus interfaces used to move data to and from computer storage devices such as hard drives and tape drives.

Our new Ultrastar drives will continue to play an important and growing role in data centers that require 24x7 availability for cloud storage, massive scale out (MSO) data farms, data warehousing, disk-to-disk backup, RAID arrays and more, Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at Hitachi GST said in a statement.

With the industry's highest MTBF on a 7,200 RPM HDD, the Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 family helps cutting down system downtime and eliminating service calls.

IT managers can also leverage the new 3TB Ultrastar 7K3000 drive's low power, high capacity and lower cost per gigabyte to optimize floor space and improve power-density requirements, ultimately helping to take pressure off of shrinking data centers and budgets, Hitachi added.

Providing the best watts per gigabyte (watt/GB), the Ultrastar 7K3000 drive delivers 50 percent more capacity in the same footprint and does so at a 32 percent reduction in watts/GB versus Hitachi's prior generation Ultrastar A7K2000 drives.

Hitachi said Ultrastar 7K3000 also allows better utilization of floor space in terms of GB per square foot (GB/sq ft.) and watts/GB when compared to 2.5-inch, capacity-optimized, 7,200 RPM enterprise hard drives.

Currently, these 2.5-inch drives cost roughly twice the dollars per GB ($/GB) of 3TB, 3.5-inch 7,200 RPM drives with 66 percent less capacity. To reach the same capacity as a 3TB, 3.5-inch Ultrastar 7K3000 drive, customers would have to purchase three 1TB 2.5-inch 7,200 RPM drives, which will consume up to 170 percent higher watts to power the drives and will occupy three times the storage array slots.

Hitachi noted that the Ultrastar 7K3000 SATA and SAS models are available with a bulk data encryption (BDE) options.

Though, the Ultrastar 7K3000 SATA model uses proprietary Hitachi encryption, the Ultrastar 7K3000 dual-port SAS model is targeted at emerging 6Gb/s SAS enterprise infrastructures and is designed to meet the industry standard TCG Enterprise_A encryption specification.

The new Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 family comes in 3TB and 2TB offerings, and is now shipping with a 6 gigabits per second (6Gb/s) SATA interface worldwide. The Ultrastar 7K3000 6Gb/s SAS family is expected to be available in mid-2011.