The HUC101414CSS300is the highest capacity member of the C10K147 series, being another high-RPM 2.5″ unit from the late 2000’s. Offering 147GB of capacity & 16MB of cache, it’s a repsectable drive for the period, when the SSD market hadn’t taken off like it has today, offering a competitive high-speed 2.5″ drive.
It’s not too uncommon to still see these drives simply discarded or just leaving service today, demonstrating how long they were expected to function. Like many of its counterparts, this particular example is still available for functional demonstration.
Drive Attributes ----------------------------------------- Hitachi Ultrastar C10K147 HUC101414CSS300 ----------------------------------------- Capacity 147GB Mfc Date 2008-04-22 Format 2.5" Height 15mm Interface SAS Platters 2 Heads 4 Cache 16MB RPM 10000 Protocol SAS-1/300 Origin Singapore (HGST-S) -----------------------------------------
The C10K147’s capped out with two-platter configurations, with this HUC101414CSS300 holding just that. As the series name would suggest, 147GB was the top player, but a single-platter 73GB variant was also available.
This drive, like a previously demonstrated Fujitsu MAY2073RC, served its life in a Sun Microsystems server of some sort.
As expected for an enterprise-grade Hitachi, this unit was produced in their factory in Singapore.
Before moving on, it would be rude to ignore Hitachi’s excellent label layout & information display. Everything you could ask for is given: capacity, date of manufacture, spindle RPM, etc. It’s excellent. This unit was produced in April 2008.
The rear of the drive is plain & clean. Perhaps not too dissimilar to a standard 9.5mm 2.5″ drive of the period, although clearly not of the same calibre.
The spindle motor connection is quite interesting (with pads seen below), but aside from that it’s quite blank as expected.
Dealing with four IC’s of note, there’s a custom Hitachi controller to the bottom-right. Hitachi continued to use their own in-house design for IC’s on their own enterprise-grade units, being a trend that started back in the mid-late 90’s with their own “native” hard drive production (prior to IBM’s design influence).
The EtronTech EM6A9320 is a 4M x 32 DDR SDRAM chip to the top left. Surprisingly, there is documentation available covering this IC, which can be seen here.
Aside from the notation that the PCB was produced in China, unfortunately there’s no other interesting markings.
[please check back later for benchmarks!]
This particular unit has had just over 3 years of power-on time. Not too shabby for an enterprise unit, so it will likely last a while longer if put back into full-time service.
Even modern 2.5″ drives can be loud, with the C10K147’s being a prime example. Unfortunately, it’s yet another design lost to the past of Hitachi’s presence in the hard drive space.
If you missed the video I made on this drive, you can find it here: