600GB on HGST 2.5-Inch 15,000rpm SAS HDD
Like Seagate but shipping now
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on February 27, 2014 at 2:57 pmHGST, Inc., a Western Digital company, is shipping a new family of high-performance, high-capacity, 2.5-inch small form factor (SFF), 15K HDD – the Ultrastar C15K600 family.
Delivering performance and capacity in one streamlined solution, the family enables higher density and higher performing servers, blades and network storage arrays all while reducing space requirements, lowering cooling costs and improving TCO .
Enterprise Demands Necessitate Fast, Efficient Storage
The demand for more efficient storage continues to grow as IT and facilities collide, creating the need for a better balance between capacity, performance, physical space and energy usage. To bridge this gap, customising and tiering infrastructure workloads and tuning HDDs and SSDs by application and function will help data centre managers more efficiently handle ever-increasing amounts of data.
Supporting demanding 24/7 enterprise workloads like on-line transaction processing and intensive data analytics, the Ultrastar C15K600 delivers the highest 15K HDD performance in the industry. This is achieved through several innovations, including HGST’s media caching technology, which provides a large caching mechanism for incoming data resulting in enhanced write performance over solutions with limited NAND or flash-based non-volatile cache (NVC). The result is two times better random write performance than current generation 2.5-inch 15K drives, and two and a half times better performance than 3.5-inch 15K drives. It is also the only 2.5-inch enterprise HDD family to feature a 12Gb SAS interface for reliable data throughput and a 128MB cache buffer for optimised R/W response time for reliable high-performance computing.
By doubling the capacity of current generation 2.5-inch 15K drives, and matching the highest capacity point of 3.5-inch 15K drives, the Ultrastar C15K600 keeps pace with the need for improved storage density. Its 600GB capacity match further enables enterprise customers to transition from 3.5-inch to 2.5-inch HDD platforms while benefitting from other gains such as higher performance and lower power. For example, when faced with power limitations, the Ultrastar C15K600 drive’s 2.5-inch SFF, along with HGST Advanced Power Management technology, provides up to a 55% improvement in active power and 54% improvement in idle power consumption over HGST’s current 3.5-inch 15K HDDs.
Continued Demand for Performance Enterprise HDDs
Based on IDC industry data and customer feedback, HGST is seeing that by 2016, the Performance Enterprise (15K and 10K) HDD total available market (TAM) will be more than two times the unit size of the enterprise SSD TAM. Also, with many customers supporting both new and legacy systems, the 15K Ultrastar C15K600 family will be offered in 512e, 512n and 4K Advanced Format.
“A couple of factors are keeping the demand strong for 15K HDDs,” said Brendan Collins, VP of product marketing, HGST. “First, our customers continue to use 15K HDDs along with a complement of SSDs in tiered pools of storage, depending on their performance, capacity, and power efficiency requirements. Our new Ultrastar C15K600 fills a need for storage that is more cost effective than SSDs, and has the performance, reliability and capacity requirements needed by mission-critical enterprise applications. Also, we see that the industry is transitioning away from 15K 3.5-inch HDDs to smaller 2.5-inch drives to help reduce space requirements, while offering comparable capacities to the legacy 3.5-inch 15K products.”
FIPS 140-2 Certification and Flexible Encryption Options
The Ultrastar C15K600 SAS 15K HDD family offers a range of security and encryption options depending on the customer’s requirements, including Instant Secure Erase (ISE), Trusted Computing Group (TCG) enterprise SSC-compliant Self-Encrypting Drives (SED), and TCG enterprise SED with FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) 140-2 certification, Level 2.
Complementing the new family, HGST also announced that its enterprise Ultrastar 12Gb SAS SSDs are certified and conform to FIPS 140-2, Level 2. They are the fastest family of enterprise SAS SSDs designed for the most demanding applications such as high-frequency trading, online banking, cloud computing, and big data analytics. FIPS 140-2 is the standard in IT security for use in government and regulated industries such as financial and health institutions that collect, store, transfer, share and disseminate sensitive, but unclassified, information.
The Ultrastar C15K600 family delivers 2 million hours MTBF, an annual failure rate of 0.44% and comes with a five-year limited warranty.
The 512n and 4Kn versions of the HDD family are now shipping, and are being qualified by select OEMs. The 512e version will be available this summer.
The newly FIPS 140-2 certified Ultrastar 12Gb SAS SSDs are also now shipping.
Comments
With current magnetic technology, 600GB seems to be the capacity limit for a 2.5-inch HDD rotating at 15,000rpm. Furthermore, there is not only a problem of areal density, but of heat at this fastest rotational speed for HDDs. That's why the manufacturers are obliged to use smaller glass disks, only 54mm in diameter (vs. 65mm for 10,000rpm units and 95mm for notebook HDDs). For 10,000rpm HDD, today's maximum capacity is 1.2TB.
We suppose that 15,000rpm devices will progressively disappear, in great competition wih much faster and reliable SSDs with lower power consumption. Just an example: other HDD maker Toshiba is offering a 2Gb SAS 2.5-inch SSD at 800GB on eMLC NAND with transfer rate of 410MB/s write and 1,100MB/s write. It's only 189MB/s to 248MB/s for the new HGST 15,000rpm unit. Of course, there is a difference of price, but not so important for data centers able to pay a premium to get the best performance for their critical applications. Remark that HGST is comparing its new HDD with other HDDs, not with its own SSDs. Its Virident FlashMAX, result of the acquisition of Virident is a bomb compared to the C15K600: up to 4.8TB, 16 micro (not milli) seconds, 2.6GB/s read bandwidth.
As far we know, Seagate never launched officially an HDDs series called Enterprise Performance 15K HDDs that are about the same as the HGST C15K600 here. The specs are all he same but one: 6Gb SAS interface for Seagate, 12Gb SAS for HGST, but it's not a big difficulty for Seagate to add a new controller with the faster interface in the near future. Another slight difference: HGST said it's shipping now, Seagate being ready later, "for mid-2014".
For both companies, 600GB is a capacity record for 15,000rpm units, Toshiba culminating today at 300GB. On its side, WD appears to leave the enterprise HDD market to let that to its HGST subsidiary with historically more expertise in these high-end devices.
Note also that FC is not anymore offered on the most recent 15,000rpm devices.
Like Seagate, HGST proposes its unit with two other capacities: 300GB and 450GB.
In fact, the two companies are the leaders in enterprise HDDs since many years with about the same products launched at about the same time, the difference being in the time of shipping, but generally only few months. Behind them, Toshiba, in this field since the acquisition of Fujitsu HDD, is more often late and behind the competition.
Comparison between the two existing 600GB 15,000rpm 2.5-inch HDDs
| Manufacturer | HGST | Seagate |
| Model | Ultrastar C15K600 | Enterprise Performance 15K HDD |
| Disks/heads | 3/6 | 3/6 |
| Interface | 12Gb SAS | 6Gb SAS |
| Z-height | 14.8mm | 15mm |
| Average latency | 2ms | 2ms |
| Cache | 128MB | 128MB |
| Sustained transfer rate | 188 to 271MB/s | 189 to 248MB/s |
| Warranty | 5 years | 5 years |
| MTBF | 2 million hours | 2 million hours |
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