What’s the World’s Fastest Hard Drive for Mission Critical Applications?

  • Fastest data center storage

What’s the World’s Fastest Hard Drive?

Seagate Enterprise Performance 15K HDDThe answer: Seagate launched it today — the industry’s fastest and highest-performing hard drive — the Seagate Enterprise Performance 15K.6 HDD. 15,000-rm spin speed, high-capacity up to 900GB, in a 2.5-inch small form factor drive designed for data center efficiency requiring minimum operating power in a dense server environment

Just how fast is “the fastest?” Up to 315MB/s sustained data transfer rate, the industry’s highest. It’s engineered to move critical data, fast.

Who needs such an insanely fast hard drive?

If you’re an IT data center architect, you already know you want it. It’s the kind of drive that, as part of a tiered-storage architecture, makes sure your company’s or your client’s hot data can be accessed immediately, constantly, at any moment, for quick decision making — all while lowering total cost of ownership through high reliability, security and easy data center integration.

So, what if (like me) you’re not an IT professional? I may not be installing this drive at home, but we’re all benefitting from it every day — because this kind of speed is what helps cloud service providers and big enterprises move critical data where it’s needed to ensure smooth and seamless connected experiences for business, organizations and consumer users. And we all depend on that for our shopping, shipping, banking and online financial transactions, and even for our medical care — everything that needs that big data analytics; for our web and social sharing and communication, for our ever-increasing streaming entertainment options, and for the behind-the-scenes analytics so many apps use all day every day.

Enhanced Caching technology kicks performance even higher

It’s not only the 15,000-rpm spin speed and maximum data rate that make Enterprise Performance 15K HDD the fastest hard drive addressing data centers’ demand for higher capacities — it’s also a combination of performance innovations in enhanced read and write caching techniques for maximizing data acquisition. Seagate’s Enhanced Caching feature TurboBoost™ and Advanced Write Caching accelerates performance in our enterprise drives.

  • Seagate TurboBoost technology kicks performance into a higher gear and reduces latency, by using NAND flash and advanced algorithms to accelerate I/O operations and optimize response times. It simplifies deploying flash-based caching by one-upping traditional storage tiering. Unlike other tiering and caching offerings, TurboBoost-equipped drives identify frequently-accessed read data and move it to cache. These drives also operate in a nonvolatile write-back mode, which can greatly reduce latency for I/O writes.
  • Seagate’s Advanced Write Caching technology utilizes enhanced algorithms that enable the industry’s highest storage workload performance efficiencies. It delivers a remarkable 20% performance improvement in random writes over previous-generation HDDs without Advanced Write Caching.

Brian Payne, Dell EMC executive director for server solutions, agrees: “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. By delivering higher performance and capacity, Seagate’s latest Enterprise Performance 15K HDD will be a sound investment for dynamic server-storage environments.”

That’s right — Seagate is once again driving innovation to meet the needs of today’s data-driven economy.

“Our new Enterprise Performance 15K HDD ensures that the data is secure, available on demand and always bringing more value to our customers,” said John Morris, vice president of global HDD products at Seagate. And for all those other storage tiers servicing every kind of data from hot to cold, Morris says, “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.”

The product details

Story Highlights - Seagate Enterprise Performance 15K HDDThe 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. Featuring capacities up to 900GB, the drive optimizes mission critical workloads by delivering (up to 315MB/s sustained transfer rate). 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.

FastFormat works for your installed systems, works for your future systems

“Our FastFormat feature helps ensure this drive is sustainable for the long term,” says Barbara Craig, senior product marketing manager. “It’s flexible enough to support legacy systems with the 512e format, and when customers’ applications are ready to move to 4K native hard drive formats, this drive can be transformed to a 4K native drive. You don’t need to buy yet another drive down the road.”

That’s important in an era when many data center customers are implementing automated storage tiering—dynamically moving information between different disk types to meet space, performance and cost requirements.

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 proven quality and field reliability, protecting from data loss and unneeded expense.

Supported by demonstrated technologies and Seagate’s proven reliability and quality commitment, the new Enterprise Performance 15K HDD family delivers enterprise-class specifications such as 2 million hours MTBF (mean time between failures) and a low annualized failure rate of 0.44 percent. It will be available worldwide this quarter.

2024-01-29T14:51:10+00:00

About the Author:

John Paulsen
John Paulsen is a "Data for Good" advocate, with more than 20 years in the data storage industry. He's helped launch many industry-firsts including HAMR technology, 10K-rpm and 15K-rpm hard drives, drives designed specifically for video and for gaming, Serial ATA drives, fluid dynamic HDD motors, 60TB SSDs, and MACH.2 multi-actuator technology.