HGST, a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC), today announced that it is shipping a new family of high-performance, high-capacity, 2.5-inch small form factor (SFF), 15K RPM enterprise-class hard disk drives (HDD) - the Ultrastar C15K600 family. Delivering best-in-class performance and capacity in one streamlined solution, the new Ultrastar C15K600 family enables 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).

Enterprise Demands Necessitate Fast, Efficient Storage
The demand for more efficient storage continues to grow as IT and facilities collide, creating the need for a better balance between capacity, performance, physical space and energy usage. To bridge this gap, customising and tiering infrastructure workloads and tuning HDDs and SSDs by application and function will help data centre managers more efficiently handle ever-increasing amounts of data.

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). The result is 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 is also the only 2.5-inch enterprise-class HDD family to feature a SAS 12Gb/s interface for reliable data throughput and a 128MB cache buffer for optimised read/write response time for reliable high-performance computing.

By doubling the capacity of current generation 2.5-inch 15K drives, and matching the highest capacity point of 3.5-inch 15K drives, the Ultrastar C15K600 easily keeps pace with the need for improved storage density. Its 600GB capacity match further enables enterprise customers to transition from 3.5-inch to 2.5-inch 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-inch SFF, along with HGST Advanced Power Management technology, provides up to a 55 percent improvement in active power and 54 percent improvement in idle power consumption over HGST’s current 3.5-inch 15K HDDs.

Continued Demand for Performance Enterprise Hard Disk Drives
Based on IDC industry data and customer feedback, HGST is seeing that by 2016, the Performance Enterprise (15K and 10K) HDD Total Available Market (TAM) will be more than two times the unit size of the Enterprise SSD TAM. Also, with many customers supporting both new and legacy systems, the 15K Ultrastar C15K600 family will be offered in 512e, 512n and 4K Advanced Format.

“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.”

FIPS 140-2 Certification and Flexible Encryption Options
The new Ultrastar C15K600 SAS 15K HDD family offers the broadest range of security and encryption options depending on the customer’s requirements, 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.

Complementing the new Ultrastar C15K600 HDD family, HGST also announced today that its enterprise-class Ultrastar 12Gb/s SAS SSDs are certified and conform to FIPS 140-2, Level 2. HGST’s 12Gb/s SAS SSDs are the industry’s fastest and most advanced family of enterprise-class SAS SSDs designed for the most demanding applications such as high-frequency trading, online banking, cloud computing, and big data analytics. FIPS 140-2 is the standard in IT security for use in government and regulated industries such as financial and health institutions that collect, store, transfer, share and disseminate sensitive, but unclassified, information.