Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. announced the official opening of a new substrate manufacturing facility located in Sarawak, Malaysia. Hitachi GST acquired the facility in July and has been increasing the production of aluminum substrates used to manufacture its desktop-class hard drives. Hitachi GST Sarawak will play an important role in enhancing product competitiveness by providing greater access to world-class components. Sarawak is located in close proximity to existing Hitachi GST suppliers and drive assembly operations, which will increase operational efficiency and provide other long-term benefits. The Sarawak facility is expected to produce the majority of the company's aluminum substrate requirements.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. announced the appointment of Michael A. (Mick) Murray as chief financial officer. As a key member of the executive management team, Mr. Murray will focus on positioning the company for sustained profitability and long-term growth. Mr. Murray was most recently senior vice president, Finance, and chief accounting officer at Yahoo! Inc. Murray has more than 25 years of financial and operational expertise in both corporate and public accounting environments.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. announced worldwide availability of two new 15,000 RPM Ultrastar hard drives for Tier 0/1, mission-critical, enterprise storage applications. The new drives include the Ultrastar C15K147, Hitachi's first 15,000 RPM, 2.5-inch 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drive, and the new 600GB Ultrastar 15K600, the company's fourth generation 3.5-inch drive with either 6Gb/s SAS or 4Gb/s Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FCAL) interfaces. To help enterprises protect sensitive data and comply with privacy and data protection regulations, Hitachi now offers industry-compliant, self-encrypting, enterprise-class hard drives as an option across all of its 10,000 and 15,000 RPM Ultrastar drives. While enterprise operating costs continue to escalate, most IT budgets are either flat or trending downward. At the same time, enterprise data is proliferating at an unabated rate and sensitive data must be protected. These factors combine to make storage efficiency, data protection and return on assets (ROA) among the most pressing concerns for data center managers. In these environments, every possible technique must be applied to achieve maximum value, efficiency and security. This could mean applying tiered storage methods, implementing encryption technologies, reducing power, maximizing cooling while minimizing space requirements, or obtaining maximum performance out of individual components and systems. Hitachi factors each of these considerations into the design of every enterprise hard drive it makes with a relentless focus on pushing speed, areal density, low power and reliability.