Enterprise Performance 15K HDD v6 is fastest yet, claims Seagate

Storage solutions company, Seagate Technology, claims to have launched the industry’s fastest and highest-performing hard drive, the Seagate Enterprise Performance 15K HDD v6. According to the company, the hard drive features capacities up to 900GB and optimizes mission critical workloads by delivering data performance up to 315MB/s sustained transfer rate.

How will it help?

Seagate states that the drive will enable enterprises and cloud customers to move critical data fast to ensure smooth and seamless connected experiences for business, organization and consumer users. It will also lower the total cost of ownership through high reliability, security and easy data center integration. John Morris, Vice President, Global HDD Products, Seagate said, “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.”

“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.”

How does it work?

According to the company the 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. The drive also 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.

Features of the 15K HDD

• Capacity options of 900 GB, 600 GB and 300 GB
• Accelerates I/O operations and completes more transactions faster — for OLTP, big data analytics and data warehousing — even during peak demand
• Read caching with Seagate TurboBoost technology for optimum response times and Advanced Write Caching for the industry’s highest mission-critical storage workload efficiency
• Choice between 512n format or a new Fast Format feature for advanced formats (4Kn and 512e) and simplified integration into all data centres
• Data-at-rest is protected with Seagate Secure technology (SED, SED-FIPS and Common Criteria) as defined by the AES-256 standard (TCP)

The design

Seagate states that the drive 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. Using Seagate’s FastFormat feature, it is available in both a 512 native and a single advanced format (512e and 4Kn) model that claims to support current and future systems. The Enterprise Performance 15K HDD addresses the demand for higher capacities with a combination of performance innovations in enhanced read and write caching techniques for maximizing data acquisition. The drive is also outfitted with enterprise‐class reliability for consistent mission critical performance in a 24×7 multi‐drive environment. The new family of drives claims to deliver enterprise-class specifications such as 2 million hours MTBF (mean time between failures) and a low annualized failure rate of 0.44% and will be made available globally starting November.