One's speedy, one's a fat boy: WD and Toshiba spin out new HDDs

Toshiba has introduced a 12Gbit/s SAS disk interface AL13 series disk drive, doubling its interface bandwidth compared to previous models, while WD has launched a power-sipping high-capacity drive.

Toshiba’s 2.5-inch, 15,000 rpm AL13SX capacities go from 300GB, through 450GB to 600GB. Obviously it's smaller and uses less power than 600GB, 15K 3.5-inch drives.

Capacity-wise it's no advance on the 600GB AL13SXQ and AL13SXB announced a year ago. As well as doubling that drive’s SAS connectivity the cache has doubled from 64MiB to 128MiB.

The AL13SX can be formatted with with either native 512 or 4Kn (512 emulation) byte sectors. Self-encrypting models will be available.

In a statement that may raise eyebrows Scott Wright, HDD product marketing director for Toshiba Storage Products BU, said: “Drives with 15,000 RPM continue to be the backbone of mission-critical IT operations."

The 12Gbit/s SAS upgrade should help this continue for a while but for how long? Anybody involved in 15K enterprise HDDs better be polishing their CVs, thinking about high-capacity 3.5-inch drives or learning about flash.

AL13SX detail; looks like a 3 X 200GB platter design

WD Re+

Talking about high-cap drives, WD has a new and more power-efficient one. Its new Re+ is said to be “the most power efficient … high-capacity platform available today.”

It holds up to 6TB and consumes 6 watts on average during sequential read/write operations. This is sufficient, WD says, for “customers’ TCO increase and savings for large deployments [to] be millions of dollars per year.”

The Re and Se’s equivalent power draw measure is an average 9.3 watts for sequential read and write operations. WD has dropped this to 6 watts by, we think, slowing the Re+ speed down to 5,760rpm from the Re’s 7,200rpm. That affects the transfer rate; 175MB/sec for the Re+ compared to the Re’s 225MB/sec.

Yes, the Re+ really does have five platters

Like the Re and Se drives the Re+ has a 6Gbit/s SATA interface.

WD says the Re+ has a reliability rating of 550 TB/year workload, the same as the Re and “the highest workload capability of any WD 3.5-inch hard drive.”

WD says the current 4TB maximum of the 7200rpm Re and Se drives has been increased to 6TB as well. Se drives are for SMB to high-end NAS and large-scale datacenter replication environments running 24x7x365. The Re products are for “demanding datacenter and cloud storage needs,” and “high-intensity datacenter applications.”

The 6TB Re+ is available now for qualification and has a a 5-year warranty. The 6TB Re and Se drives will be available for qualification next quarter. Toshiba's AL13SX should have sample shipments starting this month. ®