There have always been fewer options in the enterprise-storage market than there have been in the consumer market. That's why it's significant that enterprise buyers now have another choice.
Western Digital announced Tuesday its entry into the enterprise market with the first shipments of its WD S25, 10,000rpm, 2.5-inch SAS interface hard drives.
The new WD S25 enterprise hard drive from Western Digital.
(Credit: Western Digital)While high-end consumer-grade 2.5-inch SATA hard drives can spin at 7,200rpm, at 10,000rpm the new hard drive from Western Digital is still considered entry-level. This is because in the enterprise market, vendors such as Seagate already offer SAS-based hard drives that spin at 15,000rpm.
Nonetheless, according to Western Digital, the new WD S25 drive is still suitable for high-performance storage for mission-critical enterprise server and enterprise-storage applications, such as high-I/O-driven applications, data centers, and large data arrays. Each drive offers up to 300GB of storage space.
The WD S25 supports both the 3Gbps and the 6Gbps SAS interfaces and offers a sustained sequential data rate of 128MBps. In addition to having the speed needed for enterprise needs, the WD S25 also provides a mean time between failures (MTBF) rating of 1.6 million hours.
The WD S25 drive is available now. You won't be able to buy one for yourself, but chances are you'll find them in your new enterprise-storage gear.
Seagate has been busy at work. A day after it started shipping the first SATA 6Gbps hard drive, it now is shipping enterprise hard drives with self-encrypting features.
(Credit:
Seagate)
The hard drive maker announced Tuesday the worldwide availability of the Seagate Secure Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) option across its portfolio of enterprise-class hard drives. The products that come with this option include the Savvio (both the 15K.2 and 10K.3 versions), Constellation, and Cheetah 15K.7 drives.
According to Seagate, these enterprise-class products are the company's first-to-market drives with the SED technology, designed to deliver transparent security features for servers and high-end storage systems.
The SED technology offers complete data protection against information breaches that can occur in drives and systems that have been repurposed, decommissioned, disposed of, sent for repair, misplaced, or stolen. As an example of how easy date exposure takes place, Seagate revealed that 90 percent of hard drives returned for warranty purposes still contain readable data. This will not be the case with those that have SED, on which the data would not be readable without proper credentials.
According to Seagate, other than the security, the Seagate SED's encryption engine matches the full interface speed of the drive and therefore drive performance does not suffer when the encryption is turned on. The company's disk encryption technology is also supported by the security protocol developed through the Trusted Computing Group (TCG). This means it is compatible with a wide range of devices and major storage system providers.
These new self-encrypting drives are available only to Seagate's enterprise clients. It's unclear how much they cost.
Seagate claims that its all new family of hard drives offers the lowest power consumption and record-setting for any tier-two enterprise applications.
The new Seagate Constellation ES hard drive.
(Credit: Seagate)The Constellation family, as it's called, includes two models: the 2.5-inch Constellation and the 3.5-inch Constellation ES. Both drives also include PowerChoice from Seagate, which decreases power consumption by up to 54 percent, arguably the highest in the industry.
According to Seagate, the PowerChoice technology is designed to deliver the power-reduction savings without sacrificing performance and data integrity. In addition, the Constellation family features enterprise-grade reliability and is rated at a full 1.2 million hours of mean time between failures.
The Constellation 2.5-inch hard drive offers capacities of 160GB and 500GB with SATA2 and new SAS 2.0 interfaces that offer throughput speeds of 3Gbps and 6Gbps, respectively.
The 3.5-inch Constellation ES hard drive, on the other hand, will be available in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities. This drive also offers both SAS and SATA interfaces. Unlike Seagate's Savvio family of enterprise hard drives that spin at 10,000rpm or higher, the Constellation ES spins at only 7200rpm. However, it's the the first 3.5-inch hard drive that provides up to 2TB of storage, for now.
The new Constellation family features Seagate's unified storage architecture that converges advanced storage technologies including serial attached SCSI, small design, and self encryption into a powerful, yet simple, storage foundation.
Both the 2.5-inch Constellation and the 3.5-inch Constellation ES will be available in the third quarter of the year. Right now, it's unclear how much either will cost.
After some time focusing on 2.5-inch hard drives and sort of neglecting the 3.5-inch segment, Seagate announced on Tuesday its new Cheetah 15K.7 and Cheetah NS.2 hard drives.
These high-speed drives are geared toward enterprise storage environments by offering speed, capacity, and reliability, along with low power consumption.
The inside of a Cheetah hard drive from Seagate. The line has just gotten a boost.
(Credit: Seagate)Both drives offer up to 600GB of storage and feature second-generation PowerTrim technology, which dynamically optimizes drive power consumption at all levels of activity. However, the Cheetah 15K.7 is geared toward the highest possible performance, while the Cheetah NS.2 focuses on power savings. Seagate claims the NS.2 uses upward of 20 percent less energy than its predecessor.
Note that these are high-end enterprise-grade hard drives. In this area, capacity is still much lower than in the consumer sector. Seagate released a 1.5TB SATA hard drive for desktop computers a while ago.
The main differences between the two drives are their spindle speeds and seek time. The 15K.7 spins at 15,000 rpm, while the NS.2 spins at 10,000 rpm; their respective seek time specs are 3.4 and 3.8 milliseconds. Other than that, both feature:
- Capacity : 300GB, 450GB, 600GB
- Interface: 6Gbps SAS-2.0, 4Gbps FC
- Reliability: 0.55 percent AFR / 1.6M hours MTBF
- Cache: 16MB
The Cheetah NS.2 drive is available to customers immediately, while the Cheetah 15K.7 drive is currently available only to OEM vendors and will start shipping in the second quarter of the year. It's unclear how much these drives cost.
Among hard drives for general consumers, Western Digital's Rapter Velocity drives have been well accepted to be the fastest. It's a different story in the enterprise market.
(Credit:
Seagate)
On Monday, Seagate introduced its next generation of the Savvio HDD, called Savvio 15k.2, that, according to Seagate, is the world's fastest, greenest hard drive.
While the "greenest" notion is hard to determine, the new hard drive indeed has impressive specs. With the same form factor as a regular 2.5-inch laptop hard drive, the Savvio 15k.2 spins at 15,000rpm--high-end consumer HDDs generally spin at 7,200rpm--and features a SAS 2.0 interface. This allows the drive to offer speeds up to 6Gb per second. At this speed, the drive can read or write 768MB of data--that's more than enough to fill a CD-ROM--in one second.
The Savvio 15K.2 hard drive and the previously announced Savvio 10K.3 hard drive are both part of Seagate's new Unified Storage architecture, which makes hard drives faster and easier to work with.
The new hard drive is also the first small form factor 15,000 enterprise that uses Advanced Encryption Standard encryption for its self-encrypting feature. AES allows for protection of information throughout a drive's life cycle even when the drive is retired and leaves the data center.
The Savvio 15K.2 HDD is available in 146GB and 73GB versions. Thanks to small 2.5-inch form factor and built-in PowerTrim technology, according to Seagate, the new Savvio 15K.2 drives reduces power consumption up to 70 percent over comparable 3.5-inch 15,000rpm drives.
For now it's unclear how much the new drives cost, but you will soon find them in popular server computers, such as the HP Proliant or the Dell PowerEdge.
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