Hot on the heels of Hitachi, Fujitsu introduces its own 300GB drive that uses four disk platters Fujitsu Ltd. announced Monday two new additions to its line-up of enterprise hard disk drives.Its MAT family of drives, expected to be commercially available from the third-quarter of this year, have a rotation speed of 10,000 rpm (revolutions per minute) and will be available in capacities of 73GB, 147GB, and 300GB, said Joel Hagberg, vice president of marketing at Fujitsu Computer Products of America.The company’s announcement comes about a week after rival Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. became the first drive-maker to announce a 300GB, 10,000 rpm drive. Fujitsu says its drive has an advantage over the Hitachi model because it uses four disk platters compared to the five used by Hitachi. Fujitsu can get away with using one less platter because it uses a more advanced technology that crams data closer together: 75Gb per square inch compared to Hitachi’s 61Gb per square inch.“It means lower power consumption, because turning five platters is a 20 percent increase in mass,” said Hagberg. “Also a lower power consumption means less heat is generated so the drive runs cooler and that will help all components in a system and help reliability. With the higher density you should also see a higher data rate because you have potentially 20 percent more bits on a track.”The average read seek time for the Fujitsu drive is 4.5 milliseconds against 4.7 milliseconds for the Hitachi drive. Fujitsu’s second new disk family, the MAU series, is expected to be available a few months following the MAT drives and models run at a faster speed of 15,000 rpm. They will be available at 36GB, 73GB, and 147GB capacities, said Hagberg. The average read seek time is 3.2 milliseconds.Both drives will be available in either Ultra 320 SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface) or 2Gbps Fiber Channel interface versions. Pricing has not yet been announced. Software Development