From X-bit Labs: Toshiba Corp. has introduced its latest breed of 15K hard disk drives that increase performance and capacity of enterprise-class hard disk drives aimed at mission-critical applications. The new storage solutions will offer all the latest technologies and formats, but will hardly be able to offer competitive performance compared to solid-state drives.
Toshiba AL13SX series comes in 300GB, 450GB and 600GB capacities, and delivers high performance thanks to 15K RPM spindle speed while supporting industry standard 512n sector lengths in a 2.5” form-factor. The 4K native sector and 512e emulation models of the drives include Toshiba’s persistent write cache technology for improved data integrity and performance. Overall, the AL13SX series supports high storage density, saving rack space and reducing mission critical storage footprint and operational burden for enterprise customers.
The new 15K hard disk drives sport 64MB cache as well as SAS-6Gb/s interface. Toshiba states 2ms average latency, 2.7ms average read seek time and 2.95ms average write seek time. The drives consume 5.8W in idle mode and 9W in active mode.
“The 15,000 RPM disk continues to be the backbone of mission critical IT operations. Toshiba’s AL13SX doubles available capacity while preserving the low-latency and energy efficiency customers require. While older 3.5-inch 15000 RPM disk drives are withdrawing from the market, the AL13SX provides a clear migration path to 2.5” models with the same 600GB capacity and lower latency for improved performance with a significant power savings – a real win-win for the important mission-critical storage category,” said Don Jeanette, senior director of marketing at Toshiba ыtorage зroducts business unit.
While 15K hard disk drives cannot compete against solid-state drives in terms of performance, the may represent a good value for the market of relatively low-cost enterprise-class storage. For example, such drives are just what the doctor ordered when there is a need for mission-critical-class storage devices with massive capacity at a relatively affordable price.
Sample shipments of Toshiba AL13SX-series hard drives will start from the middle of March, 2014.
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