With mass availability in 2007, the Ultrastar 15K300 would be Hitachi’s latest & greatest high-speed enterprise hard disk series. Bridging the gap with these models being available in SAS, SCSI or fibre-channel configurations, it’s safe to say they had a very flexible end environment.
As the name would suggest, these drives run at a blistering 15k RPM, with a maximum capacity of 300GB.
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Drive Attributes ----------------------------------------- Hitachi Ultrastar 15K300 HUS153014VLS300 ----------------------------------------- Capacity 147GB Mfc Date 2009-05-26 Format 3.5" Interface SAS Platters 2 Heads 4 Cache 16MB RPM 15000 Protocol SAS-1/300 Origin Singapore (HGST-S) -----------------------------------------
Being the mid-capacity option, the HUS153014VLS300 only holds a measly two platters. The highest end 300GB units would obviously hold four platters, being the maximum supported total count for this HDA.
![](https://bananahdd.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/uas-label-1.jpg)
Fortunately, Hitachi were always good at labels. RPM & capacity are very clear.
This unit was produced in May 2009, by HGST Singapore. This factory was an initial conception by IBM in 1994, being their production hub for drives designated for their storage subsystems and server equipment. Hitachi took the reigns in 2003 post-acquisition of IBM’s hard drive division, which kept the same purpose: enterprise & server grade units.
It would be under Western Digital’s hands that this long-running hard drive factory in Singapore finally met its end, being another sad loss past Hitachi’s departure.
![](https://bananahdd.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/IMG_4147-scaled.jpg)
IC’s face outwards, far beyond standard consumer-grade expectations in terms of overall board size.
![](https://bananahdd.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/uas-15k-pcb-scaled.jpg)
A custom LSI chip stands in the centre, alongside a completely custom Hitachi processing unit.
The full 16MB of cache is provided by Samsung, but aside from this there’s nothing special about the entire logic layout on this drive, being as integrated as it is.
![](https://bananahdd.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/uas-15k-pcb-r-scaled.jpg)
The rear has no hidden chips, unlike many of Hitachi’s past designs commonly hiding a secondary cache chip on the back.
![](https://bananahdd.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/uas-15k-base-scaled.jpg)
It’s blank and pretty boring, nothing special.
![](https://bananahdd.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/hus-hdtune.jpg)
![](https://bananahdd.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/hus-cdm.jpg)
![](https://bananahdd.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/hus-hds.jpg)
While this drive has a relatively high level of total power on hours, the overall lifetime writes are quite low for a drive of this nature. It likely sat idle for huge intervals, possibly suiting use as archival storage.
If you’re curious to see the full health metrics available for this drive, feel free to check the report generated by HD Sentinel below:
Hitachi Ultrastar 15K300 HUS153014VLS300 – Disk Health Report (.html, opens in new tab)
Feel free to check out the following additional official documentation covering this series:
Hitachi Ultrastar 15K300 Datasheet (.pdf)
Hitachi Ultrastar 15K300 Product & Specifications Manual (.pdf)
If you missed the video I made on this drive, you can find it here: