GreySquare Blog

Seagate today announced its 2.5″ SCSI Savvio 15k drive which  spins at a mind blowing 15,000 RPM. Seagate claims that its 15k drive on 2.5″ platters spins 10% faster than its 3.5″ cheetah counter-part making it the fastest drive on the block.

That’s a bold claim to make, but the drive’s 2.5″ form factor could actually help it on this front. Even with perpendicular recording, Seagate can only squeeze 36GB onto the Savvio 15K’s platters. That results in fewer gigabytes per drive actuator, but it’s the actuator speed that often limits performance in enterprise server environments. The fact that the Savvio 15K has less data per actuator than a 3.5″ drive can actually make it faster, at least in applications that emphasize random access times rather than sequential transfer rates.

Savvio 15K drives are already shipping in volume to HP and will be released into the channel in the first quarter of this year with capacities of 36GB and 73GB. The drives will come with a 16MB cache and a SAS interface, and they appear to compare well with Seagate’s existing Cheetah 15K.5. The 73GB Cheetah, for example, has a 3.5ms seek time, consumes 8.4W, and has a MTBF of 1.4 million hours. The 73GB Savvio 15K has a seek time of 2.9ms, consumes only 5.8W, and enjoys a MTBF of 1.6 million hours. There’s no word on how much the new Savvio 15K drives will cost when they hit the channel, but we’re working on getting our hands on a drive for a full review.

I feel happy that atleast some progress is being made at the Von Neumann Bottleneck. And that it was by Seagate makes me feel even more good, I being an ardent fan.