Toshiba Intros 2.5" HDDs with 15K RPM Spindle Speed

Toshiba has revealed a 2.5-inch 300 GB HDD spinning at 15,000 RPM although it's not the first drive of this kind on the market.

This week Toshiba revealed what it deems as the industry’s highest-capacity 2.5-inch high performance enterprise-class line of drives. Called the Toshiba MK01GRRB/R, it uses an SAS 6 Gb/s interface. spins at 15,000 RPM and offers a top capacity of 300 GB. But Seagate already beat Toshiba to the market with a similar line earlier this year, the Savvio 15K 2.5-inch hard drives, which offers the same spin speeds and capacity.

According to Toshiba, its new third generation 2.5-inch 15,000 RPM enterprise drives leverage an enhanced power condition state that reduces drive spin in idle states, significantly lowering power consumption. That means less heat generated, less power consumed overall, and extra cash in the company's pocket. Business owners can also rest assured that data will be protected thanks to the new line's self-encryption technology which is designed to the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) "Enterprise SSC" specification.

"SED technology provides simple and complete data security throughout the drive’s usable life cycle – with no performance impact – and enables organizations to crypto-graphically erase protected data securely, enabling the ability to return, service, repurpose, or retire drives without lengthy data overwrite operations or physical destruction of the drive," Toshiba said.

The new line is expected to go live in Q1 2012 with the launch of four models: the 300 GB MK3001GRRB (without encryption) and MK3001GRRR (with encryption), and the 147 GB MK1401GRRB (without encryption) and MK1401GRRR (with encryption). All four will have an average seek time of 2.7 ms (read) and 3.0 ms (write), an SAS 6 Gb/s interface, and a 15,000 RPM rotational speed. However the 300 GB drives will consume 4.5 watts whereas the smaller 147 GB drives will consume 4.3 watts.

"Toshiba small form factor enterprise drives deliver the performance, capacity and security features IT administrators require for today’s mission critical server, storage and cloud appliance markets," Toshiba said.