IBM hopes to regain some lost market share with the introduction of their new professional harddrive series. No consumer models are planned as of yet but maybe we will see some technology adoptions in the future. Available today, the new Ultrastar 146Z10 is the first 10,000 RPM hard drive of its generation to ship in volume and has a top capacity of 146 gigabytes (GB). To enhance performance, the drive comes with a large eight megabyte (MB) cache. It also debuts with new anti-vibration technology called Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) to improve performance in large disk arrays. RVS addresses a problem inherent to multi-drive systems. As rotational speeds have increased and multiple drives are housed in powerful disk arrays, vibration is exacerbated and results in performance degradation. RVS represents advanced servo technology that autonomically compensates for vibration caused by multiple disk drives operating simultaneously. It intelligently identifies the direction and intensity of the vibration and cancels out the deleterious effects of the vibration. Technical Specifications
Ultrastar 146Z10
146/73/36/18 GB*
780 grams (max)
10,000 RPM
3 ms average latency
825 Mbps max media transfer rate
26.3 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
6/3/2/1 glass disk platter(s)
12/6/3/2 GMR recording head(s)
225 Gs (1ms) nonoperating shock, 45 Gs (2 ms) operating shock
4.7 ms average seek time
25.4 mm (+/-0.4)
3.7 Bels typical idle acoustics
4.5 Bels typical operating acoustics
8 MB buffer
Power: 10.2 watts (idle), 16.0 (max)
Ultra320 SCSI compatible; backward compatible to Ultra160 SCSI
2Gb Fibre Channel compatible; backward compatible to 1Gb
* gigabyte = 1 billion bytes
Source: IBM