Seagate Claims 2.5" SCSI Drive is World's Fastest 218
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."
Nice, but not big news. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Moving disks are old SSD is in (Score:2, Insightful)
RAM based SSD is nice, but flash based SSD won't touch a decent 15k drive for any write heavy application.
Re:Why the low capacity? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nice, but not big news. (Score:3, Insightful)
>> seek time is lower, because the read head doesn't have the
>> extra 1" to cover.
it's even more trivial than you paint. The 2.5 and 3.5 numbers
represent diameter, but the head only travels on one side of
the disk so to it the difference is only 0.5 inch as far as it
is concerned.
Re:How many seek/ECC errors does it give?? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:How many seek/ECC errors does it give?? (Score:2, Insightful)
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!
Re:What about for professional use? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Nice, but not big news. (Score:2, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be better to put the partition at the outer edge of the disk, where you get higher data rates and more data per cylinder (and thus less head movement to get from beginning to end of the partition)?
Re:SAS is a little disappointing (Score:3, Insightful)
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.