Hitachi's new 15000 RPM hard disk

Hitachi has launched a new 450 GB Hard disk for servers, the Ultrastar 15K450. The disk is available in Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Fibre Channel (FCAL), features 16 MB cache and 15.000 RPM. By using the PMR technology (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) this hard disk has a greater data density than it's predecessor, the 15K300.

The disk has an accesstime of 3.6 ms and a transfer speed that lies between 100 and 160 MB per second, dependant on the position of the sector to be read on a platter. The 15K450 with all it's upgrades is about 30% faster than the previous model according to Hitachi. The high performances however come with a downside: the FCAL model consumes up to 17.9 Watts, whereas the SAS one can use up to 17.2 Watts under load.

The recommended price is still unknown, more detailed specifications can be found here.