14 DAY TRIAL // Just months ago when Western Digital acquired Hitachi’s HDD division, it was required by the authorities to transfer some technology to Toshiba in order to make the Japanese company look like a third desktop HDD competitor.
Toshiba only manufactures 2.5” laptop HDDs and, with the help of Fujitsu’s old enterprise storage division is now into enterprise business also.
We’re still waiting to see if the promised 3.5” desktop HDD will ever surface, but clearly today is not that day.
Up until now, the situation in the global HDD market is the same dreaded duopoly that got Seagate and Western Digital ruling over 90% of the market and 100% of the 3.5” HDD market.
We, the users, are left paying horribly high HDD prices fattening WD and Seagate’s pockets, while also paying the authorities for “defending” our interests.
Like we just said, the HDDs Toshiba is launching today are part of the company’s enterprise line.
The most potent model is called AL13SEB900, which is a 900 GB enterprise HDD that has its platters spinning at an impressive 10,500 rotations per minute.
The high rotational speed results in a very fast access time that is rated at just 3.7 milliseconds when reading, and 4.1 milliseconds when writing.
This is about 300% faster than most desktop HDDs in our computers at home.
The internal transfer rate is a high 286 MB/s and Toshiba says that this is about 31% more than its 2010 enterprise HDD models.
AL13SEB900 uses a SAS 2.0 interface and consumes only 2.7 watts when the rotational speed is lowered.
Toshiba is also proudly touting a 41% decrease in internal controller power consumption.
There will be four models available in August this year, with capacities ranging from 300 GB to 900 GB.
