It might not have the most storage space, but it's fast and very enduring

Jul 9, 2014 12:43 GMT  ·  By

Some sacrifices sometimes have to be made for the sake of special perks, and while some HDDs can pack all the best features, most only excel in one or two areas, due to cost concerns and the fact that overpowered hardware just isn't necessary most of the time. The latest HDD from HGST illustrates this.

Rather than having both a huge capacity and a high degree of endurance, plus a high platter speed, the new Ultrastar C10K1800 went for compactness and sacrificed some of the potential storage space to retain the rest of the perks.

In other words, the latest drive to leave the labs of the Western Digital subsidiary is a 2.5-inch HDD with top capacity of 1.8 TB and platter speed of 10,000 RPM (rotations per minute).

It is the sort of device made to work in mission-critical storage applications where the HDD is expected to stay operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

1.8 TB is a fairly rare capacity point really. It is meant as a better but similarly priced alternative to 2.5-inch 10K SFF drives of 1.5TB.

The transfer speed is quite fast, thanks to the 12 Gbps SAS interface. You won't see the magnetic storage unit reaching the top theoretical maximum throughput (only SSDs can hope to do that for now), but read and write speeds should still go more than well.

HGST also included advanced format options (for new and legacy system support), like 4K native, 512 emulation, even 512 native formatting. In layman terms, this means that the new drive can still be used in servers and data centers with older hardware.

Instant Secure Erase (ISE) is included too, plus a bunch of other security enhancements, like Trusted Computing Group (TCG) enterprise SSC-compliant Self-Encrypting Drives (SED), and TCG enterprise SED with FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) 140-2 certification, Level 2.

All in all, compared to previous-generation 10K 2.5-inch HDDs, HGST's Ultrastar C10K1800 should have up to 2.5X better random write performance and 23 percent superior sequential performance. Add to that power saving (up to 7% advantage in idle mode) and the drive is ready to essentially replace whatever 2.5-inch 10K RPM HDDs HGST already has on sale. Especially with the MTBF of 2 million hours.

Sadly, the FIPS-certified models won't come out until January 2015, even if the normal ones are already up for sale. The price is still unknown for now.