WD’s HGST debuts world’s first 1.8TB 10K HDD

HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., this week introduced the industry’s first hard disk drive with 1.8TB capacity, 10K rpm spindle speed and SAS-12Gb/s interface. The drive will be used in mission-critical applications that do not require maximum possible performance offered by solid-state storage solutions, but take advantage of rapid speed and requiring 24/7 availability.

Based on HGST’s field proven 2.5” small form-factor high-quality design, the 2.5” enterprise-class Ultrastar C10K1800 combines high capacity with a significant improvement in both random write and sequential performance for mission-critical storage applications requiring 24/7 availability, according to the manufacturer.

HGST Ultrastar C10K1800 hard drives available in 300GB, 450GB, 600GB, 900GB, 1.2TB and 1.8TB capacities are powered by the latest-generation enterprise-class 2.5” platters with 580Gb/sq.in or 620Gb/sq.in areal density (the drives integrate from one to four platters). The new drives feature 10520 rpm spindle speed, 128MB cache buffer, 2.85ms average latency, 3.3 – 4.4ms seek time as well as sustained transfer rates from media to host between 129MB/s and 247MB/s (depending on the capacity, sector size, physical location of data on media and other factors). The drives consume up to 5.7W – 7.4W of power depending on the model.

The Ultrastar C10K1800-series hard disk drives feature 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 a significant improvement in write performance even at high workloads when compared to solutions with limited NAND or flash-based NVC.

According to the manufacturer, as the demand for enterprise-class storage grows, customers are deploying tiered storage infrastructures built along a range of raw IOPS performance, capacity and $/GB price efficiencies. While solid state drives (SSDs) and 15K HDDs are designed for maximum performance, the demand for 10K HDDs remains 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, vice president 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.”

The Ultrastar C10K1800 hard drive family is now shipping, and is being qualified by select OEMs. The FIPS certified models will be available in January 2015. The drives come with two million hours MTBF rating and five-year warranty.

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KitGuru Says: While solid-stat drives are gaining market share, the demands for storage are growing so rapidly that there is plenty of need for fast hard disk drives as well, especially in tiered storage environments.

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