Hitachi Promotes SATA Hard Drive to Enterprise Ranks; Deskstar E7K500 Achieves Enterprise-class Rating with 1.0 Million-hour MTBF and Industry-leading 5-year Warranty

Business Wire, August 28, 2006

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Recognizing the importance and growing market opportunity of the nearline enterprise storage segment, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has bolstered its field-tested and award-winning 3.5-inch Deskstar(R) 7K500 Serial-ATA (SATA) hard disk drive to achieve an enterprise-class rating. Uniquely designed to provide enterprise-class reliability, the Deskstar 7K500, now E7K500 SATA 500 GB hard disk drive delivers one million hours Mean Time Between Failure(1) (MTBF) and the industry's most comprehensive five-year warranty.

With this offering, Hitachi allows enterprise customers to take advantage of the Deskstar E7K500's high reliability, high capacity and low cost per gigabyte for tiered storage, RAID configurations and disk-to-disk backup. The proven combination of Hitachi's leading Ultrastar(R) enterprise-class server products and the Deskstar E7K500 nearline storage solution provides customers with a complete enterprise serial portfolio that spans high-capacity and mission-critical, ultra high-performance applications.

"Enterprise storage vendors require certain levels of drive capacities, performance and reliability in their storage solutions," said Dave Reinsel, program director, storage research at IDC. "SATA drives possessing a 1.0M hour MTBF, like Hitachi's Deskstar E7K500 SATA drive, will play an increasingly important role in data centers that require 24 x 7 availability for disk-to-disk backup, email/video archiving and other nearline storage applications."

IDC predicts a 2005-2010 CAGR of 38 percent in the use of high-capacity, low-cost drives in enterprise applications.(2)

"The Deskstar E7K500 delivers field-proven reliability and performance for a range of nearline enterprise applications that require the right mix of functionality at a low cost per gigabyte," said Jose Antelo, vice president and general manager, business management, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "We have implemented a five-year warranty with the enterprise customer in mind, providing them with the reliability safeguards they've come to expect with enterprise-class hard disk drives."

Deskstar Enterprise-ready Features

The Deskstar E7K500 hard drive is optimized for use in enterprise environments with capabilities such as Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS), which maintains the hard drive's performance in high rotational vibration environments where multiple drives reside in a single enclosure. The drive has the ability to stagger or delay spin-up, enabling the host to individually spin up drives in multi-drive configurations. This reduces the power draw of a booting system and allows system designers to reduce the size of the power supply and minimize the total cost of ownership for end users. To maintain drive reliability, the Deskstar E7K500 has an optional low-power mode to reduce system heat / cooling requirements, as well as a load / unload ramp mechanism to protect user data when power is removed.

The Deskstar E7K500 utilizes Hitachi's iridium-manganese-chromium (IrMnCr) read-head sensor, which provides a 2x improvement in sensitivity and precision of the data-reading process. This translates to greater hard-drive reliability due to its improved ability to read data even under mechanical and environmental stress factors, including extreme temperature variances, humidity and shock.

The E7K500 was the first drive to support SATA 3.0 Gb/s transfer rates in addition to the 500 GB capacity point. This drive also features Native Command Queuing (NCQ), a method of controlling and optimizing commands sent from the host processor to the drive to enable faster application activities. The Deskstar E7K500 supports a large 16 MB cache to further improve performance over desktop-class products.

The Deskstar E7K500 carries the industry's most comprehensive 5-year warranty with product replacement values throughout the life of the warranty that exceed those available from other hard drive suppliers. The warranty includes repair, replacement or credit options.

Hitachi's Deskstar E7K500 drives meet the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) compliance directive issued by the European Union (EU). The EU directive requires electronics manufacturers to significantly reduce lead and other selected content from their products by August 2006.

The Deskstar E7K500 is shipping now.

For additional information, please visit Hitachi's Web site at www.hitachigst.com.

(1) An MTBF measurement is based on a sample population and is estimated by statistical measurements and acceleration algorithms under nearline / low duty cycle workload. MTBF ratings are not intended to predict an individual drive's reliability. MTBF is not a warranty measurement.

(2) IDC report #201478, "Worldwide Hard Disk Drive 2006-2010 Forecast and Analysis: Record-Breaking Years Lie Ahead"

About Hitachi Global Storage Technologies

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is a storage technology leader, founded in 2003 through the combination of Hitachi's and IBM's hard disk drive businesses. Hitachi GST enables users to fully engage in the digital lifestyle by providing high-value hard disk storage in formats suitable for the office, on the road and in the home.