Slashdot Mirror
Seagate Claims 2.5" SCSI Drive is World's Fastest
theraindog writes "Seagate has announced a 2.5" SCSI hard drive that spins at an astounding 15,000RPM. The Savvio 15K is the first 2.5" hard drive with a 15K-RPM spindle speed, but what's more interesting is that Seagate claims it's the fastest hard drive on the market. Indeed, the drive boasts an impressive 2.9ms seek time, which is more than half a millisecond quicker than that of comparable 3.5" SCSI drives. The Savvio 15K also features perpendicular recording technology and a claimed Mean Time Between Failures of 1.6 million hours."
Generally speaking, Seagate's Savvio line of HDDs are intended for server and enterprise storage (read: SAN/NAS) use, not for laptop use. 2.5" hard drives are particularly useful in some compact storage arrays or in blade servers. They probably consume wayyyy to much power for your average laptop. Also, most laptops don't feature SCSI storage. Most use IDE or SATA. It's possible that Seagate could, in the future, come out with a SATA version of this drive, but I don't think it's likely given the power consumption and heat characteristics of 15K RPM drives. Seagates laptop drives don't even break 7.2K.
My blog
Before you think that this means it has a lifetime of 182 years: this is not the case. The definition of MTBF is not related to lifetime.
SAS is not designed to be used by a SATA controller. If you wanted your cheapo SATA controller to work with SAS drives, it wouldn't be a cheapo controller. The difference between SAS and SATA is that SAS uses SCSI as its command language, which requires a whole different set of logic on the controller end.
If you're a workstation user looking for a speed boost, then you use SCSI or SAS drives with a proper controller like workstations have since 1990.
And Flash drives have almost no chance of penetration in the server market, which is where this drive is being targeted (not at Laptop or Workstation users). Don't let the 2.5" form factor make you think it's for laptops, it's for high density servers or blades.
"I want to get more into theory, because everything works in theory." -John Cash
The reason "seek time" isn't listed for SSD devices is the same reason dynamic RAM manufacturers don't list "seek time" in their device specifications, namely, it doesn't apply. In storage device parlance "seek time" refers to the time it takes for the drive head to reach the target data on a rotating disk. Read the (ahem) authoritative Wikipedia article here.
Furthermore, the recently announce flash-based SSD's from Samsung and SanDisk have file access times far superior to any rotating disk-based storage device. However, it is true that the dynamic RAM-based devices have access times that are approximately 10 times faster than the flash-based devices, but the flash based devices have file acces times typically much more than 10 times faster than a disk drive's seek time. For reference, see the SanDisk press release for their SSD device.
MTBF is only defined within the drives expected life (something like 3 or 5 years). So, if you take 182 drives, you expect about 5 of them to die within 5 years, even if all of them die within 10 years.
This is at the expense of all that extra storage area.
The people for whom these high end disks are intended aren't concerned with the "storage area" of individual devices. They care about the ratio of storage to spindles and arms. They buy things like this.
Why is this front page news?
Because it's a site about stuff geeks want to read. It's actually rather nice to hit the page and find some news about the latest incremental change in storage, as opposed to more move-slash, dot-on politics.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old