Seagate Savvio 15K.2 is the fastest (and greenest) Enterprise hard drive

Billed as the world's fastest, greenest hard drive available for enterprise storage systems, Seagate's latest addition to its Savvio HDD line is 70% smaller, uses 70% less power and boasts a 115% improvement in system-level performance over comparable 3.5-inch, 15,000-rpm drives.

The Savvio 15K.2 HDD also features a self-encrypting drive option that uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) government-grade encryption for protection of information throughout a drive’s lifecycle and upon retirement.

Designed for high-end and mainstream server and external storage solutions, the drive is offered in the server capacity sweet-spots of 146GB and 73GB with a SAS 2.0 interface running at 6Gb/s speeds. This enables larger topologies, 100% faster data throughput and higher signal strength over greater distances for increased storage scalability. Seagate says this combination makes the drive ideal for RAID configurations and ultimately provide up to 115% greater system-level performance when compared to systems based on 3.5-inch server-class drives.

“Server and storage array requirements in the enterprise today are especially focused on lowering power and cooling costs; satisfying growing application performance needs; and meeting government and industry compliance regulations,” said Sherman Black, senior vice president, Marketing and Strategy, Core Products Group, Seagate Technology LLC. “The Savvio® 15K.2 drive and our Unified Storage™ architecture, address these needs head-on, by providing IT departments with a best-in-class foundation that reduces storage complexity, costs, and provides peace of mind.”

Seagate’s Unified Storage architecture converges Serial Attached SCSI, Small Form Factor and Self-Encrypting Drives to boost operational efficiency while reducing cost and complexity.

“Standardizing on enterprise-class small form factor disk drives with a SAS 2.0 interface, like Seagate’s Savvio® 15K.2 drive, will allow for economies of scale for the storage industry,” according to John Rydning, IDC’s Research Director for hard disk drives. “IDC expects that shipments of small form factor enterprise class drives into enterprise storage solutions will overtake traditional 3.5-inch enterprise class drives in the marketplace by 2009.”

The Seagate Savvio 15K.2 is expected to begin shipping in December, with SED models to follow in Q1 2009.