Fujitsu has recently announced a new line of Fibre Channel drives for their Eternus storage units. The drives top out at 500 GByte each and have a "Eco-Mode" that pauses the spinning platters when the drives are inactive.

Data, whether it is in medical forms or a listing of customers, is the life-blood of any business today. The problem is finding an inexpensive method of storing the data, while still being able to access it in a reasonable amount of time.

Cheap and abundant hard-drive storage has prompted many businesses to look into near-line storage units, rather than traditional tape backups for their storage needs. These cabinet-sized are basically racks full of RAID-5 harddrives and can hold multiple TBytes of data. In fact, Fujitsu's Eternus 6000 system (without the new drives) maxes out at 306 TByte and 1020 drives.

Of course, backing up and accessing the data requires a beefy network connection. Most of the nearline units support Fibre Channel connections of 2 Gbit per second, with newer models going up to 4 Gbit.

With the new high-capacity drives, the Eternus 6000 can store over 500 TeraBytes of data. In addition to the higher capacity, the eco-mode will stop the drive's spindle when no data is being accessed. Fujitsu promises that customers can save up to 20 percent of their energy costs.