Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, now owned by Western Digital, has announced the first 4TB hard disk drive. It will fall under the enterprise-class Ultrastar 7K4000 hard drives.

The drive offers 33 percent more capacity than its predecessor, despite having the same 3.5 inch form factor.

"Optimized for space, the Ultrastar 7K4000 family is designed to offer low-power but high-performance drives for the cloud and big data markets when reducing space, power, and costs are paramount," HotHardware reports. The disk drive also offers 24 percent lower watts-per-gigabyte than its predecessor.

"Other features include Advanced format with 4096-byte sectors, backward compatibility with 512-byte emulation, 6GB/s SATA interface, 64MB cache buffer, and 2.0 million hours MTBF specification," the site adds. The drive also comes with a five-year limited warranty.

"The industry as a whole is moving to the Advanced Format standard because 4KB sectors on hard drives offer higher capacities and addresses current technological limitations with 512-byte sectors in some OSes, such as Windows XP," says Computerworld.

The Ultrastar 7K4000 drive is using the Ultrastar. It has five platters that spin at 7,200rpm.

"Western digital is marketing the drive for use in 24x7 enterprise applications such as big data, cloud computing, data warehousing, video-on-demand, disk-to-disk backup and massive scale-out storage implementations," Computerworld added.

The Ultra 7K3000, the 7K4000's predecessor, holds up to 3TB of data.

"Using the Advanced Power Management API developed by Intel and Microsoft, the Ultrastar 7K4000 can take advantage of four modes and achieve up to a 59 percent reduction in power usage, from peak usage to low RPM idle mode. In stand-by or sleep mode, the drive uses 1 watt of power," Computerworld concluded.

The drives are shipping now in limited quantities. Models are available with a native data encryption option.

Western Digital acquired Hitachi on March 8 for $3.9 billion, along with 25 million shares of stock valued at around $0.9 billion. Two subsidiaries have also been set up, with separate brands and products.

"Similar to successful multi-brand models in other industries, the two subsidiaries will compete in the marketplace with separate brands and product lines while sharing common values of customer delight, value creation, consistent profitability and growth," Western Digital said.

(reported by Jonathan Charles, edited by Surojit Chatterjee)