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."

Comments

Breaking the bottleneck

[cpearson]

They just keep chipping away at that Von Neumann bottleneck.

http://vistahelpforum.com/

Re:Breaking the bottleneck

[macadamia_harold]

The term "von Neumann bottleneck" was coined by John Backus in his 1977 ACM Turing award lecture. According to Backus: "Surely there must be a less primitive way of making big changes in the store than by pushing vast numbers of words back and forth through the von Neumann bottleneck. Not only is this tube a literal bottleneck for the data traffic a problem, but, more importantly, it is an intellectual bottleneck that has kept us tied to word-at-a-time thinking instead of encouraging us to think in terms of the larger conceptual units of the task at hand.

So that's where Ted Stephens got his analogy. I had no idea he was such a fan of the Turing awards.

Re:laptop use?

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

Nice, but not big news.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nice, but not big news.

[TopSpin]

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.

Re:wow

[pe1chl]

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.

Omission from TFA

[Timesprout]

The laptop holding the drive was itself spinning at 5000 RPM to achieve this figure, which makes it slightly difficult to use.

Re:Omission from TFA

[Hao Wu]

Spinning your computer equipments that fast would cause serious damage to components. It would not work anymore, and using it would be virtually impossible.

I think it is implausible that it was really spinning as fast as you say.

the edge of the plate spins 50 meters a second!

[dgerman]

This is insane. The edge of the plate travels 3km a minute:

2.5 inches diameter => ~20cm perimeter at 15k RPMs => 3km/Minute => 50m/s => 180 km/hr.

Re:the edge of the plate spins 50 meters a second!

[Qzukk]

For the metrically challenged among us, 180km/hr is 12025769.5 rods per fortnight, or really, really fast.

Re:What's so astounding about 15k rpm?

[drinkypoo]

You have 2.5" 15k RPM disks in production since 2002? Who are you? And how were you able to make such bitchin' hard drives in your mother's basement?

Re:What's so astounding about 15k rpm?

[TeknoHog]

I guess what's new is the 2.5'' form factor. Smaller drives should be generally faster due to increased density, but they get a bad reputation from laptop drives with really low RPM.

Re:SAS is a little disappointing

[ErMaC]

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.

Re:Moving disks are old SSD is in

[jdgeorge]

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 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.

Re:wow

[norton_I]

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.

Faster Porn?

[chromozone]

http://money.cnn.com/2006/11/30/magazines/fortune/ obrienseagate.fortune/index.htm "Not so with Bill Watkins, the mercurial, salty-mouthed Texan who runs the $15 billion hard-drive king Seagate Technology. At a San Francisco dinner on Tuesday evening, he was candid about his company's ultimate mission: "Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."