Enterprise HDD Reviews

June 17th, 2013 by Josh Shaman

HGST Ultrastar C10K900 Review

The HGST Ultrastar C10K900 is an enterprise-class, 2.5" HDD that interfaces over SAS, has a spindle speed of 10,000RPM and ranges up to 900GB in capacity. The Ultrastar C10K900 also comes in at a 14.8mm z-Height, classing it in the 15mm category. That small form factor helps to reduce organizations' overall TCO, especially in networked storage arrays or any space and/or power constrained environments. On top of that, other optimal environments for the Ultrastar C10K900 are blade and rack-mounted servers for applications such as online transaction processing (OLTP), any high performance scenario, and cloud computing.

June 10th, 2013 by Josh Shaman

WD Se HDD Review

The WD Se HDD is the company's latest 3.5" enterprise-class hard drive that ranges in capacities up to 4TB, spins at 7,200 RPM and interfaces over SATA 6Gb/s. The WD Se is designed to provide robust storage for large-scale NAS deployments, replicated environments, bulk cloud storage, and backup and archiving. The WD Se isn't geared toward revving up to the highest IOPS offered by an HDD; the drives are more affordable than performance variations and offer features required for data security by SMBs and the growing mid-range NAS market. That said, WD designed the Se series to still support moderate-workload applications with maximum sustained transfer rates claimed at up to 171MB/s.

May 8th, 2013 by Josh Shaman

Toshiba SATA HDD Enterprise 3.5" Review (MG03ACAx00)

Toshiba's new MG03 SATA enterprise 3.5" hard drives are now being offered as standard or encrypted models in the industry's highest capacity ranging up to 4TB while spinning at 7,200RPM with a SATA 6Gb/s interface. As we noted in our recent review of the MG03 4TB SAS, Toshiba has seen increasing demand for encryption and as such, they will now be offering it across all of their new models. As with the sibling SAS drives, the SATA drives offer a big jump in capacity to 4TB from 2TB as well as up to 18% faster sustained transfer rates and power consumption reduced significantly by up to 15%. Rounding out the enhancements, this new generation of SATA drives now interface over 6Gb/s SATA instead of 3Gb/s.

April 30th, 2013 by Josh Shaman

Seagate Enterprise Value HDD (Constellation CS) Review

The Seagate Enterprise Value HDD which is also known as the Constellation CS, is a 3.5", 7,200RPM SATA drive with a maximum capacity of 3TB that is targeted at organizations looking for the cost-effectiveness of consumer HDDs but also the enterprise features they need. The Constellation CS fit those needs by offering inexpensive bulk-storage for cases such as hosting unstructured data in the cloud with the lowest $/GB cost in the market. Adding to the Constellation CS drives' overall value is that at 2.75W/TB, it also offers the lowest power consumption of any new enterprise-class HDD, drawing up to 29% less power than competitive high-capacity enterprise drives by Seagate's numbers.

April 24th, 2013 by Josh Shaman

Toshiba SAS HDD Enterprise 3.5" Review (MG03SCAx00)

Toshiba's new MG03 SAS Enterprise 3.5" hard drives offer a 7,200 RPM spindle speed with top-of-the-line capacities up to 4TB and SAS 6Gb/s interface in either standard or encrypted (SED) models. The encryption feature is part of a push Toshiba is mounting to provide more security options across all new drives. The MG03 SAS Enterprise drives present a host of updates compared to the previous generation. Toshiba expanded capacities up to 4TB from 2TB, and the MG03 SAS drives now offer up to 18% faster sustained transfer rates while shaving power consumption up to 15%. Additionally, the drives offer cache buffers of 64MB, which is a significant bump from the previously offered 16MB buffers. The drives also offer error correction (ECC) for more reliability. All told, the lastest MG03 offering is on more even terms with other leading drives in the high-capacity enterprise SAS space and aims to be a viable option in a market long dominated by other drive vendors.

April 16th, 2013 by Josh Shaman

HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 Review (HUS724040ALE640)

HGST's Ultrastar 7K4000 3.5" form factor enterprise-class HDD now ranges up to 4TB in capacity and spins at 7,200RPM while interfacing over SATA 6Gb/s. The drive offers the enterprise a 33% capacity leap over previous models, and it accomplishes that task of delivering robust capacity by utilizing five platters at 800GB each to attain the maximum 4TB capacity. This is a huge feature for enterprise customers who need to maintain the same footprint for their drives without increasing their costs. Another significant feature on the Ultrastar 7K4000 is that it is offered in Advanced Format which uses a 4096-byte sector size that is still backward-compatible with the 512-byte sector size. The HGST 7K4000 drive also features 64MB of drive cache.

February 22nd, 2013 by Kevin OBrien

Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD Constellation ES.3 Review

The Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5" hard drive line is the newly rebranded family of high capacity hard drives of which the Constellation ES.3 is the newest member. The ES.3 is a 7,200 RPM, 3.5" enterprise hard drive with SAS or SATA 6Gb/s interface that's offered in capacities up to 4TB. Seagate didn't just bring a capacity bump to the line though. Compared to the prior generation Constellation ES.2, the ES.3 offers a sustained data rate of 175MB/s, up 13%, and Seagate has doubled the cache from 64MB in the ES.2 to 128MB in the ES.3.

January 29th, 2013 by Kevin OBrien

Seagate Enterprise Performance 10K HDD Savvio 10K.6 Review

The Seagate enterprise hard drive portfolio is getting a bit of a branding makeover, in this case the high-speed Savvio 10K drives migrate to the Enterprise Performance 10K category. We still know the drives underneath this umbrella by their proper names though, the Savvio 10K.6 being the subject of this review. In many ways, the 10K.6 represents a progressive step forward when compared to the prior generation 10K.5. The biggest highlight though is performance, the Savvio 10K.6 offers sustained throughput of 204MB/s, where the 10K.5 posted 168MB/s, a better than 20% increase. Such speed bumps are more than a nice to have. For many uses cases, like data centers want both performance and capacity in a high-performance storage tier, being able to move away from large form factor 15K drives and low capacity SFF 15K drives is a tremendous win.

December 5th, 2012 by Doug Crowthers

WD RE 4TB Enterprise Hard Drive Review (WD4000FYYZ)

Western Digital RAID Edition (RE) 4TB Enterprise drive takes the RE family to the 4TB capacity limit. The new drive offers a SATA 6Gbps interface with RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), dual actuator technology, enterprise build quailty to name a few of the features that make the Western Digital RE's ideal for Enterprise users looking for the fine balance between performance and capacity.

June 25th, 2012 by Kevin OBrien

Toshiba MK01GRRB/R 2.5-inch 15K SAS Enterprise Hard Drive Review

Toshiba launched the MK01GRRB series of enterprise hard drives at the end of last year. The 2.5" 15,000RPM 6Gb/s SAS drives are available in 147GB and 300GB capacities, making the MK01GRRB the fastest enterprise hard drive Toshiba offers in the 2.5-inch form factor. Toshiba isn't just about spindle performance with this family of drives though, they've also spent quite a bit of engineering to improve power consumption, further driving a better total cost of ownership.