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MK3001GRRB 2.5-inch Hard Disk Drive for Enterprise Use
with 300 Gbyte Capacity and 15,000 rpm Rotational Speed
By Toru IWAMOTO / Akihiko MAKITA / Tatsuro SASAMOTO / Keiichi YORIMITSU
Hard disk drives (HDDs) for enterprise use are primary storage devices installed in mission-critical information systems
such as servers and storage systems. In this eld, HDDs must be able to provide high reliability for long-term continuous
workloads (24 hours a day, seven days a week), as well as high performance including a high data transfer rate and high-speed
access. Low power consumption has also become essential in recent years.
In response to the needs of the market, Toshiba has developed the MK3001GRRB 2.5-inch HDD for enterprise use with a
capacity of 300 Gbyte and a rotational speed of 15,000 rpm. The MK3001GRRB achieves a high data transfer rate of 200
Mbit/s, a fast average seek time of 2.7 ms, and low power consumption of 4.0 W in idle state.
1. Introduction
As cloud computing becomes increasingly popular,
transaction processing that is faster than ever before is
being demanded of servers and storage systems to store
and manage various types of information. As the main
storage device in mission-critical information processing
systems, enterprise-class HDDs are required to have high
performance (e.g., high data transfer rates and high-speed
access) in addition to high reliability (to realize continuous
operation for extended periods of time).
(1) High reliability
High reliability is required to ensure continuous
operation (24 hours a day, 7 days a week) for five
years.
(2) High performance
High data transfer rates and high-speed access are
essential for processing large amounts of data within
a short period of time.
In addition, the recent promotion of energy conservation
and green products has led to requirements for low-power
consumption storage device.
In response to these requests, Toshiba developed the
MK3001GRRB 2.5-inch HDD. This product achieves
high performance and high reliability with 15,000 rpm
rotational speed, while delivering low power consumption.
2. Drive Overview
Table 1 shows the brief specifications of the
MK3001GRRB 2.5-inch HDD. The drive has a rotation
speed of 15,000 rpm and a storage capacity of 300 GB;
Table 1 Main specifications of MK3001GRRB 2.5-inch HDD for enterprise use
Item
Interface SAS 2. 0
Interface speed (Gbit/s) (Gbit/s) 6
Storag e capacity (GB) 300 147
Disks (QTY ) 2 1
Heads (QTY )
Power con sumption (W )
Rotat ion speed (rpm) 15,000
Susta ined data tra ns. rate (MB/ s) 147–2 00
Avg. seek ti me (during read ) (ms) 2.7
MTBF (10
MTBF : Mean Time betwe en Failures HDI: H ead Disk Interf ace
Idle mode 4.0 3.8
Low-R PM idle mode 3.0 2.8
6
h) 1.6
(Embed ded HDI sensor)2(Embed ded HDI sensor)
Specifications
MK3001GRRB MK1401GRRB
4
enabling up to 200 MB/s sustained data transfer rates.
Also, it enables high-speed data access with an average
seek time of 2.7 ms. Further, it achieves low power
consumption, consuming only 4.0 W while in idle mode.
For the interface, we employed SAS 2.0 (Serial Attached
SCSI [Small Computer System Interface] 2.0), which is the
mainstream HDD interface for enterprise use.
In addition to the MK3001GRRB (storage capacity: 300
GB), we have the MK1401GRRB (storage capacity: 147 GB)
and encrypting models such as the MK3001GRRR and the
MK1401GRRR in the lineup. The basic specifications are
listed in Table 1.
In the following sections, we describe the hardware and
firmware technologies that we developed to enable both
high reliability and high performance.
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3. Hardware Technologies
8 Terminals
Head with HDI Sensor
FPC
FDB Motor
Magnetic Disks
Air stabilizer
Heads
Carriage
Base Plate
Flat coil
Magnet
Figure 1 shows the drive’s internal structure. The
mechanical dimensions are compatible with SFF8201/8223, the industry standard for 2.5-inch HDDs.
Although drives for mobile PCs are thin as 9.5 mm thick,
this drive is 15 mm thick to have a highly rigid base plate
and top cover for high-speed rotation. Through computer
aided engineering (CAE) using finite element method (FEM)
analysis, we have optimized its mechanical architecture
to enable high performance, low acoustic noise, and low
power consumption.
We use fluid dynamic bearings (FDB) motor for their low
vibration and acoustic noise properties. Bearings are
the most critical mechanical component; they decisively
influence HDD operating life and reliability. For this reason,
the bearing design we use is the same as field-proven
conventional bearings. We used glass substrate disks with
an outer diameter of 57 mm and a plate thickness of 1.27
mm. An air stabilizer is placed between magnetic disks as
indicated by the dotted line in Figure 1. This air stabilizer,
which covers 3/4 of the disk periphery, is able to reduce
the disk vibration and windage generated by such highspeed disk rotation. Lower vibration and windage is able
to reduce positioning errors (disturbance force) during the
positioning control of the head over the target track.
Within the disk enclosure of MK3001GRRB (with a
storage capacity of 300 GB), four heads are mounted on a
carriage. The carriage is in turn mounted on a base via a
pair of small-sized ball bearings. The carriage is actuated
by a voice coil motor (VCM), which includes a flat coil and
magnets.
To achieve a storage capacity of 300 GB, the heads
include a newly developed head disk interface (HDI) sensor
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Figure 2 Connection of head-disk interface (HDI) sensor to flexible printed circuit
(FPC)—High-density connecting technology was used to implement the HDI sensors,
which are functional elements to increase HDD capacity.
which responds to subtle heat fluctuations between
the head and disk, between which there is a very small
clearance. In recent years, HDDs have included heaters
which are embedded in the heads’ read/write elements.
By controlling heater power, the clearances between read/
write elements and magnetic disk surfaces can be finely
controlled, thereby achieving a high recording density.
The HDI sensor is a functional element for controlling
clearance accurately. When mounting the HDI sensor, as
each head has a total of eight terminals—the existing six
terminals for read, write, and heater plus two additional
terminals—these terminals must be connected to the
flexible printed circuit (FPC) with high precision. Figure
2 shows a schematic drawing in which heads with HDI
sensors are attached to the FPC, which is in turn mounted
on the carriage.
Figure 1 Internal structure of MK3001GRRB—High reliability, high performance, low
acoustic noise, and low power consumption were achieved by optimizing the design of
the HDD’s mechanical components.
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To enable high speed seeking (average = 2.7 ms), it is
important to design a high-performance actuator with
both a powerful VCM and a lightweight and vibrationproof carriage. When designing the VCM, we ensured high
efficiency by optimizing shapes and materials through
magnetic field analyses. For the carriage design, we
conducted a large-scale FEM analysis (Figure 3) for the
entire piece of hardware and optimized the shapes and
structures of the mechanical components to prevent
undesirable vibrations and improve the damping of
vibrations, particularly those caused by large VCM forces
during the acceleration or deceleration of the carriage.
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Figure 3 Example of finite element method (FEM) analysis—By conducting large-
VCM current
Head position
Seek status
During seek
End of seek movement
1 ms
500 mA
With RV-FF
Random write performance (%)
Angular Acceleration of the HDD Case (rad/s2)
100
80
60
40
20
0
Without RV-FF
0 20 40 60 80 100
scale FEM analysis of the entirety of the HDD’s mechanical components, the shapes and
structures of each component were optimized, enabling high actuator performance.
4. Firmware Technologies
The drive’s firmware consists of the following two function
structures.
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Figure 4 Seek waveform—Alternate seek waveforms with 1/3 of the full stroke
distances; maximum acceleration exceeding 200 G during seek operations.
(1) Servo control functions
Controls the FDB motor, the VCM for head positioning
and seeking, etc.
(2) Controller firmware functions
Controls the interface that handles commands from
the host as well as the interfaces with the servo control and cache control functions.
4.1. Servo control functions
The drive achieves an average seek time of 2.7 ms. The
drive accelerates and decelerates the carriage with a
maximum acceleration exceeding 200 G; its maximum
speed reaches 3 m/s. After such rapid acceleration and
deceleration movements, the drive must quickly and stably
follow the target track. Although the width of one track is
only approximately 90 nm, the heads must be positioned
exactly above the center of the tracks. For this reason, we
had to significantly improve the servo feedback control
loop gain. We also optimized the current waveforms
during seeking by taking into consideration the resonance
frequency of the actuator in order to reduce residual
vibrations and carriage acoustic noise (Figure 4).
As part of our efforts to realize the above, we also
increased the sampling frequency of the servo controller,
used faster processors, and optimized servo controller
loop shapes.
Figure 5 Comparison of Performance with/without RV-FF Servo—Without RVFF, the performance degradation can be observed at 20 rad/s
performance degradation can be observed under 100 rad/s
is greatly improved.
2
or more; with RV-FF, no
2
. Anti-vibration performance
also expanded the RV-FF frequency band. These two
improvements contributed to a significant improvement for
the external vibration stress (Figure 5).
We can also reduce power consumption by powering
down circuits individually and reducing the rotation speed
of the disks that are not carrying out read/write operations
after the drive carries out seek movements or while it is in
an idle state. We also optimized the FDB spin-up control,
head loading and unloading controls, and reduced acoustic
noise.
By adopting such technologies, we enabled high
performance, low power consumption, and low acoustic
noise.
Enterprise class HDDs use require consideration of not
only the vibrations inside HDDs but also the influence
of external vibrations. In servers and storage systems,
multiple built-in HDDs as well as the cooling fans
may cause vibrations. To suppress the performance
degradation caused by such vibrations, we used rotational
vibration feed forward (RV-FF) technology to improve
the above-mentioned actuator feedback control. We
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4.2. Controller firmware functions
This drive is compatible with the SAS 2.0 industry
standard and enables an interface speed of up to 6
Gbits/s.
The following sections describe the drive’s maintainability
and high reliability as well as its high functionality, high
performance, and low power consumption.
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4.2.1. Maintainability and high reliability
The drive has a self-monitoring analysis reporting
technology (SMART) function, which warns of critical
HDD failures in advance, to realize a full-fledged
implementation of a logging function for detailed failure
analysis. The drive also has a self-test function, a selfdiagnostic function which allows the status of the HDD to
be diagnosed if the system requires it.
End-to-end data protection (an error detection function
executed upon any component failure) and a disk-surfacedefect avoidance function ensure data reliability at all
times. Furthermore, the following processes are executed
in the background, which may improve reliability during
continuous long-term operation.
(1) Background media scan (BMS) function
Performs a full scan of the data area at regular intervals to detect recoverable errors in advance and
automatically recover them.
(2) System area (SA) saving function
Improves the log function by periodically saving
system information on the HDD into the SA, which is
isolated from the user-accessible areas.
(2) Data queuing function
Reduces processing time by executing the write
operations of several commands together after storing
write data in the cache area.
(3) Cache function
Temporarily holds data to be read or written to/from
magnetic disks, improve command responses, and
optimizes processing in response to various access
forms from the host.
By expanding the data buffer capacity from 16 MB of the
previous model to 32 MB, we improved cache hit rates
and realized high performance.
Furthermore, we realized both high performance and low
power consumption by introducing a multi-level automatic
power saving algorithm and command-driven forcible
power saving as power saving functions.
An optional self-encryption drive (SED) function, which
allows the HDD itself to internally encrypt data, and a data
integrity field (DIF) function, which allows data protection
to be controlled at the system level, are supported.
5. Conclusion
4.2.2. High functionality, high performance,
and low power consumption
We optimized and improved the following three basic HDD
functions.
(1) Reordering function
Executes command processing in the shortest possible period of time by optimizing the execution order of
received commands (up to 128 commands).
Toru
IWAMOTO
Storage Products
Div.
Akihiko
MAKITA
Storage Products
Div.
We developed a high-performance 2.5-inch enterprise
class HDD with a rotation speed of 15,000 rpm and
an average seek time of 2.7 ms. During development,
we employed new technologies for the mechanical
components, servo control section, and controller firmware
section to enable high reliability and high performance.
Going forward, Toshiba will continue to push forward
with the development of HDDs for the enterprise market
featuring both higher performance and higher quality.
Tatsuro
SASAMOTO
Storage Products
Div.
Keiichi
YORIMITSU
Storage Products
Div.
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