Seagate announces 2.5" Savvio 15K
by Geoff Gasior - 04:00 am, January 16, 2007
The Tech Report

Today Seagate announces the latest addition to its Savvio line, and this one's rather special. The new Savvio 15K is not only the world's first 2.5" hard drive with platters spinning at 15,000 RPM, Seagate also says it's 10% faster than 3.5" 15K-RPM drives, making it the world's fastest hard drive. That's a bold claim to make, but the drive's 2.5" form factor could actually help it on this front. Even with perpendicular recording, Seagate can only squeeze 36GB onto the Savvio 15K's platters. That results in fewer gigabytes per drive actuator, but it's the actuator speed that often limits performance in enterprise server environments. The fact that the Savvio 15K has less data per actuator than a 3.5" drive can actually make it faster, at least in applications that emphasize random access times rather than sequential transfer rates.http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/11638

why bother...the arrival of hybrid drives soon will make all of these drives obsolete...

then again, I wouldn't mind having a pair of these in my pc :)

Seagate can only squeeze 36GB onto the Savvio 15K's platters.
That pretty much relegates this drive to niche applications. If you really want speed, 36 GB of RAM is affordable to the business sector. It probably won't be long until USB RAM drives reach this capacity.

That pretty much relegates this drive to niche applications.Not really. These are targeted at the server and RAID array markets. The smaller size is actually a great thing for these markets. Many applications, particularly databases, require multiple hard disks for adequate performance - often 10, 20 or more in a stripe. The trend towards larger and larger disk capacities has been a bad thing for these markets because you often end up with a lot of wasted space. e.g. If you have a 500 GB database that needs at least 10 disks for adequate performance you don't want to be buying 300 GB drives since you end up with way more capacity than you really need.

BTW, this particular drive from Seagate also comes in 73 GB capacity.

I consider high speed RAID arrays a niche market, but an important one for business. How many of these arrays are sold compared to standard desktop drives? Probably not many, but the people who need them are willing to pay for the extra performance.