PowerEdge: Dell service support plan for industry EOL of 2.5" 15k RPM SAS hard drives

As the industry continues to adopt solid state drives (SSD), the need for higher performance Mission-Critical hard drives has been declining. Hard drive vendors are ending production of 15k RPM 2.5" SAS hard drives to support increased demand for modern drive technologies.

Hard disk drive manufacturers have announced plans to end manufacturing of Mission-Critical 2.5" 15k RPM SAS hard drive products.

With the industry ending general production of 15k RPM SAS hard drives, an alternate option is necessary to support existing infrastructure. To fulfill this need, Dell is providing an enhanced 10k RPM drive with modified read/write actuator functionality. 

This improves I/O performance in several areas:

• Limits the drive head and actuator access to only the outer diameter (OD) of the disk
• The OD of the disk has the highest data transfer rate. Reducing the capacity limits access to this area, improving performance during sequential operations
• Shortens the seek (stroke) that the actuator travels, improving random operations
• The Media Cache used in 512e models of 10K hard drives provide benefits in write performance

Extensive testing has determined that by restricting access to only the outer-diameter (OD) of the platters, the performance of the 10K RPM drives matches that of the 15K RPM drives being replaced. As a result, the 10k RPM drives meet the Dell Technologies performance specification and qualify as a "like-for-like" replacement for the 15k RPM SAS drives.

NOTE: Enhanced 10k SAS drives provide higher performance by using a larger capacity disk and reducing its size to 900GB. The additional disk size is transparent to the operating system/SAS controller, and the disk firmware presents 900GB of usable space.    
 

Dell enhanced 10,000 RPM drives: 

End-of-Life Dell 15,000 RPM SAS drives: