Toshiba 2.5-Inch (SFF) 15,000rpm HDD at 300GB

Toshiba’s Storage Products Business Unit, a division of Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., announced the industry’s highest-capacity 2.5-inch high performance enterprise-class drive.

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The Toshiba MK01GRRB/R series supports the exacting requirements of compute-intensive environments with a 15,000 RPM spin speed, 6Gb/s SAS interface, and top capacity of 300GB. In addition, the Toshiba MK01GRRR models offer drive-based encryption to help companies manage data security.

"Enterprise customers are increasingly satisfying their performance and capacity needs with power efficient small form factor drives. Enterprise drives with the latest self-encryption features are helping data centers to more cost-effectively achieve compliance with information security mandates," said Joel Hagberg, vice president of marketing at Toshiba’s Storage Products Business Unit. "Toshiba small form factor enterprise drives deliver the performance, capacity and security features IT administrators require for today’s mission critical server, storage and cloud appliance markets."

Toshiba’s third generation 2.5-inch 15,000 RPM enterprise drives leverage an enhanced power condition state that reduces drive spin in idle states, significantly lowering power consumption. Lower power consumption also means lower heat dissipation, which increases system stability, and less energy use. This saves enterprises money and reduces the impact on the environment.

As part of its commitment to improved security, the Toshiba MK01GRRR drive features self-encryption technology designed to the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) ‘Enterprise SSC’ specification. SED technology provides simple and complete data security throughout the drive’s usable life cycle – with no performance impact – and enables organizations to crypto-graphically erase protected data securely, enabling the ability to return, service, repurpose, or retire drives without lengthy data overwrite operations or physical destruction of the drive.

"Increasing the capacity of 2.5-inch enterprise class HDDs is expanding the market opportunity for this form factor given its inherent power and data density advantages as compared to 3.5-inch models," said John Rydning, IDC’s research vice president for hard disk drives. "Toshiba’s new MK01GRRB/R series drives give server and storage system customers the capacity they want with the performance they need, as well as the ability to secure data on the drive with Toshiba’s SED technology option."

The Toshiba MK01GRRB/R series is scheduled to begin volume shipments in Q1 2012.

Product Specifications
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Comments

This Toshiba MK01GRRB/R follows the MBE2147RC culminating at 147GB that came from the acquisition by Toshiba of the Fujitsu's HDD business.

There are only two other manufacturers with HDDs at 15,000rpm: HGST and Seagate.

Seagate has also a 2.5-inch unit strictly comparable to this Toshiba's new one, a Savvio model also at 300GB with 6Gb SAS. HGST stops at 147GB in the same SFF form factor with the same rotational speed.

HGST and Seagate continues to offer 3.5-inch bigger models at 15,000rpm, in their Cheetah and Ultrastar lines respectively, both of them at 600GB, as well as Toshiba at 300GB.

But inside these 15,000rpm devices, the diameters of the disk platters are smaller than in regular desktop or notebook units to limit the heat generated by this fast speed. For SFF enterprise HDDs, it's generally 54mm like here - and not 65mm. For 3.5-inch HDDs, it's 81mm - and not 95mm.

15,000rpm enterprise HDDs are also thicker than notebook disk drives: 15mm - and not 9.5mm.

Today the main competitors of these fastest high-end disk drives are SSDs with better specs but higher prices.