Hitachi Travelstar C4K60 1.8-inch Drive

With the needs of the consumer electronics (CE) industry top of mind, HitachiGlobal Storage Technologies today announced a new, redesigned 1.8-inch hard diskdrive that is tailored to device manufacturers' needs - easy integration andless space consumption. In doing so, Hitachi has created a sleeker 1.8-inch harddrive that is specialized for consumer electronics.

Hitachi has replaced the standard notebook-based connector on its new TravelstarC4K60 series with a ZIF connector*, widely implemented in CE devices today. Withthe ZIF connector, Hitachi has reduced the footprint of its new drive by 10percent and enabled easier integration through a common connector, which the CEindustry has been using successfully for many years.

In portable consumer electronics, small is cool. This makes Hitachi's CE-focused1.8-inch drive the coolest cat on the block; the drive offers the smallestfootprint (3780 mm2) and lightest weight (46 grams) in its class.

"Real estate is precious commodity in consumer devices, which is why we'vefocused on reducing the space consumption of our 1.8-inch product to helpmanufacturers make smaller and sleeker devices," said Bob Holleran, generalmanager, 2.5-inch/ 1.8-inch Consumer & Commercial HDDs, Hitachi Global StorageTechnologies. "This move to create a CE-specific hard drive is one of many thatHitachi will be making to serve this growing market in a very focused way."

Size and weight aren't the only important factors in designing hard drives forthe CE space. Cramming the greatest amount of data onto a hard disk is alsoimportant to enable high capacities in increasingly smaller devices. The C4K60achieves that objective with an areal density of 99.8 gigabits per square inch,which leads the category for the 1.8-inch segment. At this density, Hitachi ismaking possible 30 gigabytes (GB)** of storage capacity on a single disk.

"Hitachi is clearly demonstrating that it's taking the CE segment seriously withthis new drive," said John Donovan, vice president of TrendFocus. "Because ofits size, high storage capacity and shock specifications, the 1.8-inch harddrive segment is defining the use of hard drives in consumer electronic deviceswhere the balance between device size and high capacity is key."

Focused On Consumer

Hitachi has considered both the needs of CE end-users and device manufacturersin creating the Travelstar C4K60 series.

"Our goal in adding and fine-tuning features on our new 1.8-inch drive is tomake it the 'essential gear' for consumer devices, alongside our award-winningone-inch Microdrive and 2.5-inch Travelstar products," said Holleran.

For device manufacturers, the ZIF connector on Hitachi's new drive providessize- and ease-of-integration benefits, but it may also result in lower designand integration costs and greater reliability. Additionally, the ZIF connector,which allows the drive to talk to the host device through a flex cable, givesmanufacturers greater flexibility in mounting schemes. For example,manufacturers could mount the Travelstar 1.8-inch drive in a floating scheme andimplement dampening or insulative materials around the drive for even bettershock protection. The ZIF connector also makes for more reliable devices throughits reduced pin-count - 40 compared to the 50 on the notebook-based connectors.

At 500 Gs operating and 1200 Gs non-operating, the C4K60 series already providesexcellent shock protection, making the 1.8-inch category the best shockperformer among all other hard disk drive categories. This is a boon for activeconsumers who often give their portable CE devices a workout in daily usage.

High-quality sound in portable entertainment devices is also of great importanceto consumers. But being light on its feet doesn't make the Travelstar C4K60series a lightweight in acoustics; the drive offers excellent noise-reductiontechnology to optimize users' listening experience. The drive's sound emissionat idle and seek operation (1.6- and 2.2-bels, consecutively) are extremely lowand undetectable by the human ear. This adds significantly to the userexperience, especially in music and video applications where 1.8-inch harddrives are growing in popularity.

The power-management features of Hitachi's new 1.8-inch drive are targeted atproviding optimum conservation in the modes at which the drive spends most ofits time: idle, read and standby. The C4K60 series offers the best combinationof power consumption in these modes, enabling up to 32 hours*** of play time inthe average digital music device.

"Hitachi has done a good job of listening to what is important to us in makingand selling CE devices with hard disk drives, especially in the portablesegment," said Mr. Chua Hiap Chew, vice president, Personal DigitalEntertainment Products, Creative Technology. "Size, capacity points, connector,power consumption and shock must all be considered differently than for ITapplications, and Hitachi has done an admirable job in creating the rightbalance of all these factors in its new 1.8-inch CE product."

The Travelstar C4K60 series for consumer electronics operates at 4200 RPM and isavailable in 20- and 30-GB capacities -- the most popular capacity points forthe MP3 segment, where 1.8-inch drives are most prevalent.

Technical Specifications

Travelstar C4K60 series
20/30 GB
7.0 mm in height
4,200 rpm
99.8 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
1/1 glass disk platter(s)
2/2 GMR recording head(s)
1200 G/1ms non-operating shock,
500 G/2ms operating shock
7.1 ms average latency
15 ms average seek time
ATA-6 100 MB/sec maximum interface transfer rate
46/46 weight in grams
1.6/1.6 Bels typical idle acoustics
2.2/2.2 Bels typical operating acoustics

* Standard notebook-based connectors are typically 50-pin connectors with acable width of 48 mm, as compared with the 22-mm flex cable and 40-pinconfigurations of the ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) connector.
** 1 gigabyte = 1 billion bytes
*** Using a 3.7 Volt 2000 mAh lithium ion battery, playing at 48kbps continuousplayback

EMC Announces World's Largest, Fastest and Most Scalable High-End Storage Array

EMC Corporation announced the largest, fastest and most scalable high-end storage array in the world, capable of providing leading functionality while scaling to one petabyte (1,024 terabytes) of capacity. The new Symmetrix DMX-3 system represents another industry milestone for EMC and leverages its market-leading Direct Matrix Architecture to provide demanding customers with unparalleled functionality, performance and tiered storage capabilities in a single system to support their information lifecycle management (ILM) strategies.

The new Symmetrix DMX-3 system complements the current Symmetrix DMX-2 Series of systems, the high-end storage market share leader. The Symmetrix DMX-3 system builds on the success of the existing Symmetrix DMX-2 Series by storing more data and delivering higher performance for customers who want to consolidate their information onto a high-end platform. The Symmetrix DMX-3 exceeds the capabilities of existing systems through a design that features increased processing power and internal bandwidth, new memory technology and support for lower cost disk drives. The Symmetrix DMX-3 system will enable customers to replace multiple existing storage platforms with a single system and pay-as-you-grow economics. The new storage array supports up to 960 disk drives today, and will be qualified to support up to 1,920 disk drives in the first half of 2006 and more than 2,000 by the end of next year.

Tony Prigmore, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said, "The EMC Symmetrix DMX architecture and its capability to scale capacity and performance continue to provide EMC with key competitive advantages. Large storage customers who continue to look for ways to ease management burdens and lower costs through consolidation will find the new Symmetrix DMX-3 offers industry-leading single-system scalability. In particular, we expect the new capability to tier storage within the array to drive demand for EMC's newest member of the DMX series."

Extending High-End Innovation and Leadership

The Symmetrix DMX-3 system was specifically designed with the performance, scalability and reliability required to support high-end configurations in a single array. The extensible DMX architecture provides the Symmetrix DMX-3 with near linear performance scalability as channel directors, memory directors and disk directors are added to the system. With a doubling of internal bandwidth, processing power and the addition of fully mirrored global memory directors based on DDR (Dual Data Rate) SDRAM memory technologies, the Symmetrix DMX-3 is the industry's highest-performing storage array in addition to being the largest.

Kevin Hart, Chief Information Officer at Level 3 Communications, one of the world's largest Internet carriers and a Symmetrix DMX-3 beta site, said, "Level 3 serves many of the world's largest and most sophisticated communications companies, carrying more than three petabytes of IP traffic across our network on a daily basis. As such, our business generates a vast amount of data that is critical to our own operations as well as those of our customers. The processing power and capacity of the EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 will, we believe, help us enhance the efficiency and quality of order management, billing, provisioning and other strategically important back-office processes and systems."

The new Symmetrix DMX-3 array is composed of a single system bay and separate storage bays. Each bay is powered independently and contains a scalable power and battery backup infrastructure to support the components within each bay. System capacity can be upgraded non-disruptively by adding either another storage bay or adding additional disk drives into available space. Likewise, additional processing power can be added by installing additional director boards while the system is online. The Symmetrix DMX-3 is compatible with all of EMC's leading high-end functionality and software.

"The new EMC Symmetrix DMX family delivers on the scalable design promise of the DMX architecture," said David Donatelli, EMC Executive Vice President, Storage Platforms Operations. "Our competition has not been able to match Symmetrix DMX-2's unique combination of scalable performance and functionality, and we are again raising the bar. We introduced innovative new high-end software functionality last year and this new system can take advantage of all of our leading capabilities. This reduces costs for our customers in terms of hardware and software acquisition and maintenance and reduces operational and management expenses. We're allowing customers to do more with less hardware, greatly enhancing total cost of ownership."

New Disk Drives and Data Mobility Software Enable "In-the-Box" Tiered Storage

The entire Symmetrix DMX Series, including the new Symmetrix DMX-3 system, will support new low-cost Fibre Channel (LC-FC) disk drives. This latest disk drive technology, expected to be available in early 2006, will enable "in-the-box" tiered storage, allowing multiple tiers of storage to be implemented in a single Symmetrix DMX system as part of an ILM strategy. Combined with EMC's broad portfolio of array, network and host-based data migration software and professional services, including today's announcement of the new EMC/Softek LDMF and EMC Open Migrator/LM software (see separate releases), EMC is further extending its lead in high-end storage and is providing new ways for enterprise customers to improve the management of information throughout its lifecycle and reduce total cost of ownership.