With a speed of 12,030 rpm, Hitachi’s DK3E1T-91 was the world’s fastest 3.5-inch hard disk drive when it was announced. It was designed for applications requiring high disk performance, such as UNIX / PC servers and disk array units.
The record-setting disk speed was achieved by using 2.5-inch disks in a 3.5-inch hard drive unit, and an access accelerator was used to reduce the average seek time to just 5 milliseconds. Furthermore, advanced signal processing technology raised the maximum data transfer speed to 27.3 MB per second.
Despite the drive’s higher performance, its read/write power consumption was just 11.8 watts — in the same vicinity as previous drives. This meant previous system enclosures and power supplies could be used without modification.
| Introduced | April 1998 | |
|---|---|---|
| Storage capacity per unit | 9.2 GB | |
| Recording density | 173,300 bytes per inch | |
| Track density | 11,000 tracks per inch | |
| Area recording density | 1.9 Gbits per square inch | |
| Number of disks | 9 | |
| Number of heads | 18 | |
| Average seek time | Read: 5 ms, write: 6 ms | |
| Disk speed | 12,030 rpm | |
| Data transfer speed | 27.3 MB/s max. | |
