Western Digital Launches World’s Highest Capacity 10k Hard Drive

Western Digital subsidiary HGST has today launched the world’s highest capacity 10k performance hard drive – the Ultrastar C10K1800 – which can store a whopping 1.8TB of data in a 2.5-inch form factor.

The drive was designed for data centre applications and tiered storage environments which require 24×7 availability. It features vastly improved random write and sequential performance over the previous record-holder – the 1.2TB Ultrastar C10K1200, which was launched by WD in January 2013.

Good things in small packages

Hard drives capable of spinning their platters at 10,000 RPM occupy a precarious position – they are not as fast as their 15k siblings, but are considerably cheaper. Meanwhile the 2.5-inch format offers less capacity, but also reduced power consumption and better storage density than the traditional 3.5-inch HDDs, allowing system builders to squeeze more drives per rack.

Ultrastar C10K1800 supports 12Gbps SAS interface and 4K Advanced Format sector technology, which grows the standard size of the sector from 512 to 4096 bytes while managing to remain completely backwards-compatible.

The drive offers average latency of 2.85 milliseconds, seek time between 3.3 and 3.7 milliseconds and typical sustained transfer rate of up to 247 MBps.

Interesting features on board include HGST’s media cache architecture, a disk-based technology which provides a 128MB non-volatile cache on the media resulting in improved reliability and data integrity during unexpected power loss.

The same technology provides up to 2.5x improvement in random write performance and a 23 percent improvement in sequential performance over the previous generation 2.5-inch 10K HDDs, and WD claims it works better than solutions with limited flash-based cache.

Ultrastar C10K1800 also offers new security and encryption options for the enterprise user, including Instant Secure Erase, support for Self-Encrypting Drives and compliance with the US FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) 140-2 certification, Level 2.

Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at HGST, said the new drive fits neatly into tiered storage architectures, where it can complement faster 15k drives and SSDs.

Ultrastar C10K1800 has already started shipping, and should be available from HGST’s OEM partners in the next few weeks.

Late last year, HGST launched the world’s first hard drive filled with Helium instead of air – the Ultrastar He6. Pumping hermetically sealed enclosures full of inert gas dramatically reduces the turbulence caused by spinning disks, making it possible to put more platters into a single drive and increasing maximum capacity to 6TB.

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