There was a time when 15K hard disk drives dominated the enterprise storage market. With their higher rotation speed compared to consumer drives, the 15K drives offered the improved and sustained performance demanded by data centers and enterprise customers. Now that NAND flash and SSDs are increasingly encroaching on this market, Seagate has released their last hurrah with their 15K.6 HDDs.
The Enterprise Performance 15K HDD v6 will be Seagate last high-speed HDD, with no more being currently being planned. In order to help customers maintain their systems, Seagate planning on making this last series very long-lasting. The long-term plan is to move increasing to offering value and larger volume as a way to maintain relevant in the flash dominated landscape. Technologies like SMR and HAMR will be critical to that but those, unfortunately, don’t offer the speeds that 15K customers would want.
As the last generation, the 15K.6 does offer notable improvements over the last generation. Speeds have improved to 315 to 215 MB/s for sustained transfers and a 16GB NAND portion to help cache data. It also includes a 256MB DRAM cache as well as 8MB of non-volatile cache for Advanced Write Caching. I suspect these drives will be the best that hard drives will ever have to offer barring some major technological breakthrough.
