HGST 10,000rpm 2.5-Inch HDD at Record 1.8TB

HGST, Inc., a Western Digital company, is shipping the world’s highest capacity and highest performing 10K RPM HDD – the Ultrastar C10K1800.

Based on HGST’s field proven design, the 2.5-inch small form factor (SFF), enterprise Ultrastar C10K1800 combines capacity with an improvement in random write and sequential performance for mission-critical storage applications requ iring 24/7 availability.

As the demand for enterprise storage grows, customers are increasingly seeking tiered storage infrastructures built along a range of raw IO/s performance, capacity and $/GB price efficiencies. While SSDs and 15K HDDs fill a need in high performance solutions, the demand for 10K HDDs continues to be strong as customers seek better $/GB metrics.

“Our customers continue to contend with explosive data growth, balancing disparate application loads, while needing to improve data center space and power efficiencies,” said Brendan Collins, VP of product marketing, HGST. “By fusing unmatched capacity with ultimate performance in the same drive, the Ultrastar C10K1800 offers the optimal balance of capacity, performance and cost. We expect our customers to use the Ultrastar C10K1800 with a complement of SSDs and 15K performance HDDs in tiered pools of storage.”

Technology Innovation
Powered by several technological innovations including HGST’s media cache architecture, an upgraded 12Gb SAS interface and advanced format options, the Ultrastar C10K1800 delivers improvements in performance and reliability to sustain the most demanding 24/7 enterprise workloads. Most notably is HGST’s media cache architecture – a disk-based caching technology, which provides a large non-volatile cache on the media resulting in improved reliability and data integrity during unexpected power loss, as well as an improvement in write performance even at high workloads when compared to solutions with limited NAND or flash-based NVC.

Key benefits of the Ultrastar C10K1800 include:

• Highest storage capacity – A new capacity point of 1.8TB with a 50% improvement over prior generation 10K 2.5-inch SFF drives.
• Performance – Leveraging HGST’s media cache architecture, it provides a boost of up to 2.5X  in random write performance and a 23% improvement in sequential performance over prior generation 2.5-inch SFF 10K HDDs.
• Next generation 12Gb SAS interface – Designed for next generation data centers, the drive provides twice the bandwidth of existing 6Gb SAS interface, while lowering data center cost and complexity along with backwards compatibility for existing devices and enclosures.
• Advanced format options that support new and legacy systems – Enabling larger capacities with support for the standards including 4K native and 512 emulation, along with a 512 native offering for legacy compatibility.
• Improved power savings – Up to a 7% improvement in active and idle power savings while providing performance improvements over the prior generation 2.5-inch SFF 10K HDDs.
• New security and encryption options for data-at-rest protection – A host of security and encryption options 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.

The Ultrastar C10K1800 HDD family delivers enterprise specifications such as 2 million hours MTBF, an annualize failure rate (AFR) of 0.44% and comes with a five-year limited warranty. It joins HGST’s portfolio of enterprise PCIe, SSD, and HDD products.

The family is shipping, and is being qualified by select OEMs. The FIPS certified models will be available in January 2015.

Complementing the Ultrastar C10K1800 HDD family, HGST also announced that the 512 emulation format for its 15K enterprise Ultrastar C15K600 product family will be shipping in July.