Marshall Brain's Blog

Hitachi Pushes Hard Drive to 400GB

Here are the specs:

• Five platters
  
• Ten heads
  
• 8MB cache
  
• 4.17 millisecond average latency
  
• 61.7 gigabits per square inch

If that is not big enough and fast enough, how about a 2.5 terabyte RAM disk for $4.7 million? The idea is that you load the disk up with large databases so you can search them very quickly. From the article:

A RamSan 320 unit holds up to 64GB of RAM in a 3U rack unit. The US government order is housed in three full height rack units. There are over 320 2Gbit/s Fibre Channel ports and the aggregate I/O rate is 36Gbit/s. That is some serious hardware.