Seagate Introduces 900GB HDD Running at 15,000rpm

Seagate has introduced a new line of hard drives for the enterprise market. The drives come in capacities of 300, 600 and 900GB, and spin at 15,000 rpm. It is the first time that a hard drive larger than 600GB has run at this speed.

The 2.5″ HDDs are available in versions with the usual 512 bytes per sector and variants with 4KB per sector. The larger sectors allow for better error correction. The normal versions have a read speed between 210 and 300MB/ s, and the 4kB versions between 215 and 315MB/s.

The drives have 300GB platters. They can be connected by means of a 12Gbit/s-sas connection. These connections are used almost exclusively in data centers and are not found in standard consumer computers.

The market for such hard drives is shrinking rapidly due to the rise of SSDs. SSDs offer much better performance than hard drives and are already available with comparable storage capacities. However, hard drives are still preferable in some situations, as they do not wear out with read and write operations and can retain their data for many years.