HGST has released a new family of high-performance, high-capacity, 2.5-in., small form factor (SFF), 15K RPM enterprise-class hard disk drives (HDD): the Ultrastar® C15K600 family. The new Ultrastar C15K600 family is designed to enable higher density and higher performing servers, blades, and network storage arrays all while reducing space requirements, lowering cooling costs and improving total cost of ownership (TCO).

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 significantly enhanced write performance over solutions with limited NAND or flash-based non-volatile cache (NVC). It is also the only 2.5-in. enterprise-class HDD family to feature a SAS 12Gb/s interface for reliable data throughput and a 128MB cache buffer for optimized read/write response time for reliable high-performance computing.

By doubling the capacity of current generation 2.5-in. 15K drives, and matching the highest capacity point of 3.5-in. 15K drives, the Ultrastar C15K600 easily keeps pace with the need for improved storage density. Its 600 GB capacity match further enables enterprise customers to transition from 3.5-in. to 2.5-in. 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-in. 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-in. 15K HDDs.

“A couple of factors are keeping the demand strong for 15K HDDs,” said Brendan Collins, vice president 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 hard drives to smaller 2.5-inch drives to help reduce space requirements, while offering comparable capacities to the legacy 3.5-inch 15K products.”