Toshiba bowls out small but nippy enterprise spinner Toshiba has a high-speed enterprise disk drive that ships data 20 per cent faster than the model before it. The 2.5-inch form factor AL14SX is an update on the prior AL13SX, launched in March 2015 with capacities of 300GB, 450GB and 600GB. The AL14SX spins at 15,000rpm and uses a 12Gbps SAS interface. Capacities are 300GB, …
"Seagate has a 15K 2.5-inch Enterprise Performance drive, launched in October 2016, that also has 300GB, 600GB and 900GB capacities. It has three platters and six heads at the 900GB capacity level, which suggests Toshiba has an areal density advantage."
Maybe the photo is of the 600GB model.
The Seagate 900GB 15K rpm drives look to be $355 for SAS, no idea for FC. You can buy 1 TB SATA SSDs for less, but enterprise versions are still more expensive.
The real reason these still exist is for FC arrays as replacements/upgrades. I don't see anyone using this for a brand new deployment, but as capacity expansion or replacement of failed drives, if you have slots in your array for fibre channel drives, a SATA SSD is not going to fill it.
There are also servers with mirrored 15K SAS boot drives, if one fails it is cheaper to replace it than to replace both with SATA SSDs (which would entail more time to do and additional testing)
My next computer is likely to have an SSD, not an HDD. However, admittedly a few years ago now, I traded in one netbook with sold state memory whose performance quickly degraded to the point where it was hardly usable. That experience informed my comment.
One alternative technology that intrigues me is SONOS.
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