Hitachi Says its New 1.8TB Ultrastar is Highest-Capacity 10K Drive

Targeting the enterprise market and data center applications with increased hard drive performance Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, a Western Digital company, announced the Ultrastar C10k1800 1.8 TB 10K RPM hard drive.

Previous Ultrastar models had a 6 Gbps SAS connector, and with the launch of the C10k1800 all models in the C10K drive family move to a 12 Gbps SAS connector. Shipping immediately, the 2.5 inch small form factor enterprise-class drive is the highest capacity 10K drive. The vendor said the project featured significant improvements in both random write and sequential performance.

While even HGST recognizes the enterprise lure towards solid state drives, the company notes that tiered storage infrastructures call for a variety of performance requirements, and that the 10K hard drives still meet the needs of cost per gigabyte of storage price efficiencies.

"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."

According to HGST the performance increase in the new drives is enabled by a media cache feature, which is a disk-based caching technology that 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 with high-demand workloads when compared to solutions with limited NAND or flash-based NVC.

The company said that the new drives also feature a number of security and encryption options, including Instant Secure Erase (ISE), Trusted Computing Group, enterprise SSC-compliant Self-Encrypting Drives, and TCG enterprise SED with FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) 140-2 certification, Level 2.

To accommodate legacy compatibility the drive family comes with both 4K native / 512 emulation and a 512 native sectors version. Complementing the new Ultrastar C10K1800 HDD family, HGST also announced that the 512 emulation format for its 15K enterprise-class Ultrastar C15K600 product family will be shipping in July.