HGST hopes new HDD will be an ultra star performer

HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital company, has announced the launch of the Ultrastar C15K600 family of hard drives.

The C15K600 family is positioned as high-performance, high-capacity, enterprise-class range of drives. It is aimed at enabling higher density and higher performing servers, blades and network storage arrays, whilst reducing space requirements and costs.

Ultrastar C15K600 drives are 2.5-inch 15K RPM devices that HGST claims deliver the highest 15K HDD performance in the industry. The company says that the drives provide, "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 also claims that the Ultrastar C15K600 range is unique in featuring an SAS 12Gb/s interface and a 128MB cache buffer.

HGST has rolled out the line based on it own market projections. It suggests that, by 2016, the total available market for Performance Enterprise (15K and 10K) HDDs will be more than two times the size of the Enterprise SSD market.

Strong demand

"A couple of factors are keeping the demand strong for 15K HDDs,"said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing for 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."

Collins continued, "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."

WD recently announced a new high-capacity HDD line for surveillance use.

• Partition your hard drive: keep your data safe