Solid state drives may have upended mechanical drives in terms of sheer speed but traditional hard drives aren't giving up without a fight. The latest example of this is HGST's new Ultrastar C10K1800 drive, billed as the world's highest capacity and highest performing 10K RPM hard drive.

In a press release on the matter, HGST (a Western Digital company) said the new enterprise-class drive combines high capacity with a significant improvement in both random write and sequential performance for mission-critical storage applications.

The C10K1800 is a 1.8TB drive stuffed into a 2.5-inch form factor with platters spinning at 10,000 RPM. It uses HGST's media cache architecture which uses a portion of the platters as a drive cache. This technology provides a boost of up to 2.5X in random write performance and a 23 percent improvement in sequential performance over prior generation 2.5-inch SFF 10K drives.

The drive is also more power efficient than previous generations. According to HGST, it's capable of providing up to a seven percent improvement in active and idle power savings.

HGST's latest uses the 12Gbps SAS interface but even still, it's really no match for a typical SSD. The drive features a latency average of 2.85ms with a maximum sustained transfer rate of 247MB/sec. What it does offer, however, is more value in terms of capacity versus price.

The Ultrastar C10K1800 drive is now shipping and is being qualified by select OEMs.