Seagate to Release First 15k RPM 2.5-inch HDDs

Seagate Technology made an unexpected announcement coming so soon after the Storage Visions conference in Las Vegas – a tag-along with CES. The company’s second wave of Savvio hard drives in the 2.5" form factor will be revved up from 10,000 to 15,000 revolutions per minute.

But as an indication that such revolutionary speed, literally speaking, may not yet be cool enough for notebooks where the company’s Momentus product line revs up to 7200 rpm, the 15K series is being billed for use in RAID storage batteries for the enterprise. There, Seagate says the new Savvios will run cooler than a typical datacenter installation, drawing 40% less power per drive while consuming about a third of the rack space.

Seagate’s value proposition for the enterprise works like this: If a smaller drive could perform better while consuming power, you could actually use fewer drives within the RAID array to achieve the same or better performance than with a lower-cost, 3.5" form factor option. Seagate is systematically phasing in higher-performance 2.5" small form factor (SFF) drives into its product line, while it phases out its corresponding 3.5" Cheetahs.