News

posted on 02 June 2008 18:17

Three in one: Seagate's third generation Savvio 2.5-inch drive is the world's first 300GB SAS small form factor (SFF) drive, the first 6Gbit/s SAS II interface SFF drive, and the world's first self-encrypting SFF drive.

The Savvio 10K.3 hard drive spins at 10,000rpm and includes Seagate FDE - Full Disk Encryption - technology. It has a 1.6 million hour Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) rating. Seagate says it uses up to 70 percent less power than a 300GB 3.5-inch drive.

Sherman Black, GM and SVP of the Seagate Enterprise Compute Business, said: “The Savvio 10K and 15K families have evolved into becoming the most widely-adopted 2.5-inch enterprise drive families throughout the enterprise. Now, with the introduction of the 300GB Savvio 10K.3 drive, more versatile storage systems can be built based upon this sweet-spot capacity.”

The new drive compares and contrasts with the following competing SFF drives:

- Fujitsu's MHZ2 250GB and 7,200rpm 2.5-inch drive. It also has a 500GB 2.5-inch drive spinning at 4,200rpm.

- Samsung's Spinpoint MP2 is a 250GB, 2.5-inch, SATA hard disk drive (HDD). Its SpinPoint M6 drive offers 500GB in its its 2.5-inch form factor and spins at 5,400rpm.

- Western Digital's 10,000rpm, 300GB VelociRaptor has a SATA interface 2.5-inch drive inside a 3.5-inch enclosure, with a 1.4 million hour MTBF rating. It has a SAS interface drive in development.

- Western Digital's Scorpio Black 7,200rpm SATA 2.5-inch drives hold up to 320GB and spin speed has just been uprated from 5,400rpm.

We can quite rapidly expect a 300GB 2.5-inch SAS drive from WD.

IDC expects 2.5-inch enterprise drive shipments to outstrip 3.5-inch enterprise drive shipments by 2010. The new Seagate drive will be generally available within the second half of 2008 and OEM evaluations are already taking place.

[Paul Roberts, news editor.]