NEWZ: Hitachi Ultrastar 15K147 SAS Now Shipping

[Computer Generated Baby]

Hitachi's latest 3½-inch buzzsaw:

• Hitachi Delivers Extreme Performance and Reliability with New 15K RPM Enterprise Hard Drives
  
  
  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....
  
  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 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....
  
  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....

Click here for the full press release at: HITACHI

 

[P5-133XL]

[
The Ultrastar 15K147 is Hitachi's highest-performer, ... and as much as 33 percent more I/Os per second compared to 10,000 RPM products....

Whatever became of to the theory of comparing apples to apples?

 

[ddrueding]

[
The Ultrastar 15K147 is Hitachi's highest-performer, ... and as much as 33 percent more I/Os per second compared to 10,000 RPM products....

Whatever became of to the theory of comparing apples to apples?

I guess it makes sense if you're comparing 147GB drives...

 

[Mercutio]

Maybe they just don't want to mention competing products in their press releases?

That is weird though. I missed that sentence on my first reading.

 

[Computer Generated Baby]

Maybe they just don't want to mention competing products in their press releases?...

I believe they were just attempting to tout 15kRPM hard drives by comparing them to 10kRPM drives -- as if they were something new (probably new to their clueless ad writer).

 

[sechs]

If Ultrastar drives are still hot, noisey, and slow, they do have to pick their comparisons carefully.

 

[connollyg]

As i see it there are two bits to this announcement,

1) The SAS drive

2) The 4Gb FC drive

Everybody seems to be concentrating on the physical HDD, nobody has anything to say about SAS or particularly the 4Gb FC side.

G

 

[P5-133XL]

That is because there is little gain in capability to the interfaces. It matters not that the interfaces have lots of BW capability to transfer data if the drive it is connected to is the limiter. What is the point of having 3-4Gb/s of BW when the drive can only transfer 640Mb/s at a peak. Without improvements in the capabilities of the drive, benefits in improvements of the interfaces are rather limited.

At some point the drives will improve and then the interfaces will become important. But, that is not the current state. This drive is no better than all the other drives out there as far as its capability of delivering data. Why would anyone spend more money with all the hassles to be an early adopter of a new technology that in the end gains nothing over the current technologies.

At least for me, that is why this drive is a big Yawn.

 

[Handruin]

I agree about the bandwidth capabilities vs. the a singel drive's capabilities. What about external SAS, or SATA connections? Are they still limited to a single drive, or are there arrays which can be connected through this interface which may contain multiple drives?