Seagate Introduces the 15,000 rpm 2.5" Hard Drives

Seagate claims that it has developed the fastest hard drive ever. The new Savvio 15K is the first 2.5" SAS enterprise hard drive which uses 15,000 rpm speed. According to Seagate, there will be two models based on the Savvio 15k line. Both of them will be built on PMR technology, but because they use higher speeds, Seagate has decided to limit the capacity of the drives to 36 and 73GB, respectively.

These hard drives come with superior performance to the 10k Savvio line and are said to ultimately replace the 3.5" 15k Cheetah series. But if you compare the new 2.5" models with the older Cheetah, you will realize that there are a lot of advantages. For example, the new models are about 70% smaller, so you can fit more of them inside your rack case. They also consume about 25% less power and because they have smaller platters, the seek time is about 10% faster. Regarding the transfer rates, Seagate claims that they have about 40% more throughput and are more reliable than the older enterprise hard drives. Reliability is rated at 1.6 million hours MTBF which is more when compared to 1.4 million hours MTBF of the Cheetah 15K.5.

According to Seagate, about 23 million 3.5" (10K/15K) server hard drives shipped during 2006 but the company estimates that this number will decrease to 15 million in 2007. The 2.5" line is said to go up in sales during 2007 with some 14 million units waiting to be sold. 2009 will mark the end of 3.5" units with less than 5 million of them being sold compared to more than 25 million 2.5" units hitting the stores in the same year. No information regarding the price is available, but we know it will be expensive as hell, especially because we're talking about Seagate's top of the line.