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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."
They've had 15K RPM SCSI drives for years and years. This is no big deal.
By only using a 2.5" drive rather than 3.5 of course the average seek time is lower, because the read head doesn't have the extra 1" to cover. This is at the expense of all that extra storage area.
You could get just about as high an average seek if you partitioned up a 3.5" 15K drive and only kept data on the inner partition.
It's nice that they have these, but it's really not that super special. Why is this front page news?
BTW, your laptop is going to need some serious cooling to use this, as 15K drives do get rather warm.
You do realize that the SSD you reference is based on flash, right? If you look carefully, you will find that no vendors list write seek times or write IOPS for such devices. The reason is that the performance is just plain awful.
RAM based SSD is nice, but flash based SSD won't touch a decent 15k drive for any write heavy application.
The increased rotational speeds dictate that they must use smaller diameter platters, or risk the platters exploding because of the increased centripetal forces exerted.
And the flip side, I've owned close to 2 dozen IBM Deskstar drives (mostly 72-80GB). No more then a handful died before their warranty period expired.
Most of those deaths were directly related to heat issues (poor cooling or poor airflow). Some were undetermined cause.
From my experience over the past decade, heat is the #1 killer. Some makes / models are better at dealing with 50C+ temperatures then others. Maxtors seemed to be a bit sensitive to anything above 50C (and Maxtor drives were a real PITA to RMA, IBM RMAs were a simple click-click-click on a web form prior to send it back).
Nowadays, I simply plan for failure (RAID1 across 3 drives or RAID10 w/ hot-spare) along with backups. I try to keep drives at or below 40C and I keep enough airflow across them that their operating them doesn't change by more then 5C between idle/active.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I completely agree that heat is the #1 killer. Yes, drives will run hot, but they will last a lot longer if they run cool. Last I checked, none of the drives I run now were hotter than 30C. I haven't had any significant drive deaths in a few years. I had one that seemed like it had firmware issues, as it would just stop responding on occasion, but would be fine when the power was re-applied.
On a side note, the hard disk in my laptop thinks that the Min/Max temps it's seen while operating is 52C/65528C. Now why the manufacturer would have used an unsigned 16 bit integer to track temperature escapes me...
KEEP YOUR DRIVES COOL, PEOPLE!
running a SAS drive in a laptop would murder the battery... unlike the SATA spec, the SAS spec does not provide for a method to turn the interface off when it is idle.
SAS stole the entire physical interface from SATA and was deliberately implemented to allow combination SAS/SATA controllers. Saying that SAS isn't designed to be used by a SATA controller shows a total lack of understanding in the matter.
SCSI doesn't offer any "speed boost" over ATA either and SAS is certainly not faster than SATA. It's the devices that may or may not be faster.
Finally, solid state storage has been used to accelerate server apps for decades.
This is apparently not your area of expertise.