HGST ships 4TB Enterprise Hard Drive

HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company) has introduced the world's first 4TB enterprise-class hard drive family, the Ultrastar 7K4000.Ushering in a new generation of 512e Advanced Format drives, the Ultrastar 7K4000 family provides space-efficient, high-performance, low-power storage for traditional enterprises as well as for the explosive big data and cloud/Internet markets where storage density, watt-per-gigabyte and cost-per-GB are critical parameters. 

Gary Watson, CTO, Nexsan said, "Our cost-effective, high-density, and scalable enterprise-class storage solutions are designed for a broad range of market applications including cloud, digital video storage, and backup, and HGST's high-capacity 7,200 RPM enterprise-class hard drives play a crucial role in our value proposition. We all know that the need for more storage is expanding in multiple directions and dimensions, and Hitachi's highly reliable, high-capacity HDDs allow us to deliver solutions where large capacities, density, and power efficiency are highly valued. We have been using Hitachi Ultrastar drives for years and look forward to qualifying their new 4TB enterprise-class drives."

Brendan Collins, VP, Product Marketing, HGST said, "We are humbled by the fact that our enterprise customers continue to appreciate and value our broad portfolio of enterprise HDDs and SDDs, which gives them multiple choices to satisfy a wide range of tiered storage requirements in the enterprise. With our new Advanced Format Ultrastar 7K4000 drives, we are providing enormous capacity earlier than otherwise possible for environments optimized for this technology, while delivering yet another offering that takes advantage of the Ultrastar family's long-standing tradition of delivering high-reliability and low power for high-density cloud and big data applications."

The Ultrastar 7K4000 family features a 6Gb/s SATA interface and a 64MB cache buffer. It is an Advanced Format drive, using 4096-byte sector size, and is backward compatible with legacy 512-byte sector size by offering built-in 512-byte emulation through the SATA interface.

The new Ultrastar 7K4000 family is now shipping in limited quantities. Customer samples are now available.