3.5” Enterprise Hard Drive Development Analyzed

2007: Ultrastar 15K300 (300GB)

The second hard drive is roughly three years old. It belongs to the product generation that succeeded the Ultrastar 15K147, doubling the capacity to 300 gigabytes. The Ultrastar 15K300 sports only four platters, rather than five, and still has 16MB buffer memory. But it does feature slightly accelerated access times.

The 2 Gb/s Fibre Channel models were dropped in favor of 4 Gb/s interfaces, and there were only Ultra320 SCSI models with 80-pin connectors, effectively scaling down the portfolio. There were 73, 147, and 300 gigabyte capacity points; 36GB was dropped at this time, clearly showing what capacities were popular the enterprise space. Apparently, a 32GB SSD wouldn’t stand a chance in typical enterprise environments because of insufficient capacity. The exceptions would be high-performance scenarios.

Compared to the Ultrastar 15K147, the Ultrastar 15K300 runs a bit cooler and also much faster. It reaches 121 MB/s maximum sequential read performance. Minimum sustainable throughput went up from 60 to 70 MB/s. So did the PCMark Vantage application performance. However, I/O performance hasn’t increased much, as there are simple physical limitations. Power requirements at idle and under load actually went up, desipte the reduction from five to four platters. Yet this still doesn’t keep the drive from outperforming its predecessor in performance per watt.

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