Toshiba answers SSD trend with 15,000rpm HDDs

Hard disk drives do not get a lot of love these days since faster and smaller solid state drives have proven useful in thin consumer electronics and enterprise servers alike. SSDs may never compete with HDDs in price per gigabyte, so in response, Toshiba launched a new 15,000rpm enterprise HDD.

The AL14SX is an update to the AL13SX HDD, and it comes with 50 percent more storage and is more power-efficient. The unit is a 2.5in HDD instead of the typical 3.5in, allowing it to better compete in an industry that is increasingly looking to conserve space. The models offer capacities of 300, 600 and 900GB. The 5.6-watt power consumption rating is a nearly 30 percent improvement over the previous generation, according to Toshiba. The drives also have a maximum sustained transfer rate of 290Mbps.

"With both 512n sector and Advanced Format sector models available, the AL14SX Series provides high performance and capacity for mission critical workloads that demand low HDD latency and superior data integrity," said Scott Wright, director of disk drive product marketing at Toshiba America Electronic Components.

This attention to what enterprise HDD users want is paying off. Toshiba was the fastest growing HDD vendor from 2015 to 2016, according to IDC. The company still has smaller market share than Seagate and Western Digital, though. The three largest HDD companies still helped stave off faster revenue erosion in a market of declining prices. The price per gigabyte in HDDs declined 18.9 percent in 2016.