Seagate Said to Have World's Fastest HDD

Seagate Technology plc launched the industry’s fastest and highest-performing HDD – the Enterprise Performance 15K HDD v6.

Featuring capacities up to 900GB, the drive optimizes mission critical workloads by delivering the industry’s highest data performance (up to 315MB/s sustained transfer rate), enabling enterprise and cloud customers to move critical data where it’s needed fast to ensure smooth and seamless connected experiences for business, organization and consumer users-all while lowering TCO through reliability, security and easy data center integration.

“Seagate is once again driving innovation to meet the needs of today’s data-driven economy,” said John Morris, VP of global HDD products, Seagate. “Our new Enterprise Performance 15K HDD ensures that the data is secure, available on demand and always bringing more value to our customers. With Seagate’s broad portfolio of both HDDs and SSDs, we’re able to cover the full range of storage solutions, delivering high performance and capacity with affordable versatility to meet the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s data centers.”

“Performance demands on enterprise datacenters today are increasing as customers consider agile storage solutions to handle diverse workloads. The key to success is to apply the right technologies to the right workloads, and we are seeing increased adoption of hybrid arrays of HDDs and SSDs enhanced by software-based caching,” said Brian Payne, executive director, server solutions, Dell EMC. “By delivering higher performance and capacity, Seagate’s latest Enterprise Performance 15K HDD will be a sound investment for dynamic server-storage environments.”

The demand for 15K HDD technology in servers continues to meet the needs of data center managers aiming to manage costs while addressing mission critical workloads, performance bottlenecks and network complexity. The Enterprise Performance 15K HDD addresses the demand for higher capacities with a combination of performance innovations in enhanced read and write caching techniques for maximizing data acquisition. The drive is also outfitted with enterprise?class reliability for consistent mission critical performance in a 24×7 multi-drive environment.

The Enterprise Performance 15K HDD is a high-capacity, 2.5-inch small form factor drive designed for data center efficiency requiring minimum operating power in a dense server environment. Utilizing Seagate’s FastFormat feature, it is available in both a 512 native and a single advanced format (512e and 4Kn) model that supports current and future systems. The drive provides the ability to address more workloads with less complexity. It also provides robust drive-level data security and data integrity while the drive is at rest, recording or retired, as well as quality and field reliability, protecting from data loss and unneeded expense.

The Enterprise Performance 15K HDD family delivers enterprise specifications such as 2 million hours MTBF and an annualized failure rate of 0.44%.

It will be available worldwide this quarter.

Comments

Seagate dominates the HDD enterprise market in front of WD/HGST and Toshiba.

Market leader in enterprise HDDs

(Source: 2016 Brand Leader Survey, IT Brand Pulse)

No one never was able to surpass 15,000rpm in this 2.5-inch form factor since many years to compete with SSDs with much higher transfer rate and lower access time.

The former Seagate 15,000rpm launched in February 2014 had a capacity of 600GB (6Gb SAS and now 12Gb SAS, also with 3 disks and 6 heads). So here it's an increase of 50% in two years, 900GB being a record in the category. The new one increased sequential data rate by 27% and random write performance by 100%.

Will it be the last 15,000rpm HDD? It's possible as it's quite difficult to go further in areal density on 2.5-inch platters. SSDs is killing this market with much higher capacities and performances, of course with a big difference of price but declining. Highest capacity on 2.5-inch SSD is now 32TB.

Trendfocus expects a -20% CAGR for 2.5-inch enterprise HDDs until 2020.

All other HDD makers are only at 600GB with 2.5-inch 12Gb SAS HDDs rotating at 15,000rpm. Last March Toshiba debuted this unit, following its MKxx01GRRB/R at 300GB with 6Gb SAS, released in November 2011. WD/HGST announced also last March the 600GB C15K600. All of them use 3 platters and 6 heads in a 2.5-inch form factor 15mm high.

Comparison of latest 2.5-inch Seagate enterprise HDD and SSD

Model

Enterprise Performance
15K v6

1200.2

Maximum capacity

900GB

4TB

Height of 2.5-inch form factor

15mm

7mm

Components

3 disks, 6 heads