The venerable 15K HDD is getting it last drink at bar, Seagate has introduced its sixth-generation Enterprise Performance 15K HDD v6, which will be the last mission-critical 15K HDD the company produces.
Seagate representatives indicated that the company is not working on future generations of 15K HDDs due to the proliferation of SSDs in the data center. The company will offer the Enterprise Performance 15K HDD v6 (otherwise known as the 15K.6) for an extended period of time to ensure that forward compatibility and replacements are on hand, as it does all of its data center HDDs, but it will offer SSDs as the go-to solution for high-performance workloads.
The move isn’t entirely surprising; it’s fair to say that the 2.5″ HDD segment has been on a managed decline recently. The “mission-critical” 2.5″ segment declined from roughly five million units in 4Q2014 to 3.2 million in 1Q2016.
HGST also has another generation of 15K data center HDDs in the works. Toshiba also has another series in the works too.
