This week, Hitachi unveiled a 2.5-inch hard disk drive that spins at 10k, has a capacity of up to 300 GB and has a dual-port 6 Gbps SAS interface.

In itself, the Ultrastar C10K300 is not that big of a deal. More interesting, though, is the fact that this is the first enterprise-class drive to incorporate the company's power-management capabilities previously found only on the Deskstar line. Managers can set a wide range of power modes designed to optimize consumption based on the kinds of data loads the drive must handle.

The company says the drive can consume as little as 3.4 watts idle and 6.1 watts active, less than half what you'd get with an existing 3.5-inch drive.

Average seek time is rated at 3.9 milliseconds with average latency at 3 milliseconds. It also sports anti-vibration technology to guard against failure in multidrive configurations.

The company won't say how much it costs, but it is available now.