Seagate’s savvy “Savvio” – world’s fastest, greenest enterprise hard drive

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 06 November 2008 09:31

IT Industry - Market

Seeking to send strong signals to the enterprise world around speed and environmental safety, Seagate has shown some savvy in creating what it calls the world’s fastest and greenest hard drive, suavely calling it the “Savvio”.

Seagate wants to be the saviour of speed and power for enterprises requiring new hard drives for their computers and data centres – and wants them to spend money on Seagate’s brand new storage solution.

Using 70% less power than “competing 3.5-inch hard drives” and called a “key component” in Seagate’s new Unified Storage architecture, the Savvio 15K.2 HDD spins at 15,000 RPM – and it’s a 2.5-inch drive instead of those competing 3.5-inch models.

In addition to speed and “record low” power consumption, Seagate have also added a self-encrypting drive option as well, adding to the drive’s features and benefits to enterprise consutomers.

Seagate also remind us of its previously announced (but yet to be released) Savvio 10K.3 drive, which along with the 15K.2 and the Unified Storage architecture offers enterprise customers improved “manageability, integration, security and performance benefits for IT departments while ensuring business continuity with no compromise.”

Enterprise hard drives don’t come in the same sizes that we’re used to in the regular world of consumer and business – the 15K.2 is offered in the “server capacity sweet-spots of 146GB and 73GB with a SAS 2.0 interface running at 6Gb/s speeds.” 

Seagate says that this “enables larger topologies, 100% faster data throughput and higher signal strength over greater distances – dramatically increasing storage scalability.” 

Although enterprise IT people would already know it, the sizes and speeds make the 15K.2 “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.”

Given that I’m personally not an enterprise hard drive expert, I had no idea this was the case, but you knew or not… you do now.

Seagate says its “onboard PowerTrim technology” is what enables the 2.5-inch sized 15K.2 to achieve the “up to 70%” power reduction to competing 3.5-inch 15,000 RPM drives.

And lest you thought this was a first generation device, it turns out the 15K.2 is a second-gen 2.5-inch 15,000 RPM drive backed by the “field-proven, enterprise-grade reliability” of the first generation models.

However it is the “first small form factor 15K enterprise self-encrypting drive that uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) government-grade encryption, enabling protection of information throughout a drive’s lifecycle and especially upon retirement when the drive leaves the data centre.”

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