Fujitsu announced MAT and MAU hard drives for enterprises

Fujitsu announced today that they will add two new types to their enterprise hard disk drives lineup.

Its MAT family of enterprise hard drives will be available in the thirth quarter of this year. It has a rotation speed of 10,000RPM and will be available in 73GB, 147GB and 300GB capacities.

The company's announcement comes about a week after rival Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. became the first drive maker to announce a 300GB, 10,000-rpm drive.

Fujitsu said its drive has an advantage over the Hitachi model because it uses four disk platters compared to the five used by Hitachi. Fujitsu can get away with using one less platter because it uses a more advanced technology that crams data closer together: 75GB/sq. in., compared with Hitachi's 61GB/sq. in.

"It means lower power consumption, because turning five platters is a 20% increase in mass," said Hagberg. "Also, a lower power consumption means less heat is generated so the drive runs cooler, and that will help all components in a system and help reliability. With the higher density, you should also see a higher data rate because you have potentially 20% more bits on a track."

The average read seek time for the Fujitsu drive is 4.5 milliseconds, compared with 4.7 milliseconds for the Hitachi drive.

The second type is the MAU series which will be available a few months after the MAT drives. The MAU disks will run at 15,000RPM and will be available in 36GB, 73GB and 147GB capacities. Their average seek time is 3.2 milliseconds.

Both drives will be available with Ultra 320 SCSI or 2Gbit/sec. Fiber Channel interfaces.

Source: Computerworld