Seagate unveiled a new version of its Savvio hard drive that it is said to be the world's fastest hard drive, the Savvio 15K with a seek time of a mere 2.9 ms.

The new 15K-rpm offers a number of advantages over 15K-rpm 3.5-inch drives including size and weight (due to 2.5-inch form factor), 30% decrease in power consumption (5.8 watts at idle), and reliability (1.6 million hour MTBF).

This reduction can make huge savings in big data centers, according to Dianne McAdam, director of enterprise information assurance for The Clipper Group, a Massachusetts-based technology consulting firm.

"A lot of these large data centers want to be more energy efficient," she said. "Clearly, all large data centers are looking at ways to save power and bring in equipment that saves power."

As expected, these drives are built on perpendicular magnetic recording technology (PMR), and are only available in sizes of 36GB and 73GB.

“Seagate is committed to delivering solutions that will meet the needs of today’s demanding IT environment, and no product demonstrates this better than the Savvio 15K drive,” said Sherman Black, senior vice president and general manager, Seagate Enterprise Compute Business.

Seagate, one of the pioneers in developing the 2.5-inch format, is hoping to replace the more widely used 3.5-inch format with the smaller drives. And that progression appears to be imminent, according to industry experts.

"The trend in I.T. is to scale down the physical size of components while scaling up capacity and performance," John Rydning, IDC's research manager for hard disk drives, said in statement published on Seagate's Web site.

HP says it has already begun shipping ProLiant servers with the drive in 36GB or 73GB models, and Seagate has also updated its more modest 10K RPM drives with the 146GB Savvio 10K.2.


written by Cristian L.