Seagate said today that it has begun to ship the fourth generation of its Savvio 10,000 RPM hard drives, which are used in high-performance servers where throughput and speed are a necessity.
These 2.5-inch disks hold 450GB or 600GB, doubling the product’s capacity. The largest capacity 2.5-inch, 10k RPM drives previously were 300GB. Also, Seagate (NYSE: STX) raised the life span of the drives, from 1.6 million hours Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) to more than 2 million hours MTBF.
Savvio 10K.4, as the latest version is dubbed, also features Protection Information technology for drive self-encryption and to protect data integrity. It detects any data corruption in-flight between the host and the drive itself. The drive also comes with PowerChoice technology to reduce the power draw while idle.
By providing greater capacity in a smaller device, Seagate believes it will open new markets for the faster drives that have previously been held by 3.5-inch, 7,200 RPM drives.
“I think it’s really going to drive the transition from 3.5-inch to 2.5-inch both in the server area as well as in external storage,” Theresa Worth, senior marketing manager for enterprise products at Seagate told InternetNews.com. “The external storage segment of the market is about one-third of the market [for high-speed drives], with servers about two-third of the market. We’ve seen slower uptake on external storage because their sweet spot is 450GB to 600GB, so we think it will open up that market.”
The drive has two connection options: 6 gigabit per second serial-attached SCSO (SAS) or 4Gbit Fibre Channel. This is the first 2.5-inch, 10k RPM drive to support Fibre, Worth said.
Despite the fact that high-speed drives run hotter and burn more power to spin faster, Seagate is still touting the drive as “green” because it’s smaller and requires less power to run and has less surface to cool. It also has up to four power settings that the user can control, such as when to put it to sleep and when to wake up.
This means the drives consume up to 60 percent less power than a 3.5-inch, 15,000 RPM drive, although 15k drives are often used in the most mission-critical, high-performance scenarios where a 10k drive just isn’t enough, so the usage models aren’t entirely even.
The drives are available now from Seagate resellers.
Andy Patrizio is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
