Infrastructure
Seagate speeds up 2.5 inch drives
And ProStor ups the capacity of cartridges.
By IDG reporters | Published 15:34, 17 January 07
Seagate Technology claims to have launched the fastest hard drive, while ProStor has upped the capacity of its removable disk cartridges.
The Seagate Savvio 15K drive is a the first 2.5 in SCSI drive to spin at 15,000rpm - a speed previously reserved for 3.5 in drives. Seagate expects 2.5 in drives to eventually replace 3.5 in units, as a tray full of the smaller drives delivers more disk I/Os than a tray full of 3.5s.
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The Savvio 15K is designed for rack-mounted servers and blade servers - HP's ProLiants will be first to use it, and IBM and Sun are testing the drives also. Avaiable in 36 Gbyte and 73 Gbyte capacities, the drive is 70 percent smaller than a 3.5 in drive, and uses 30 percent less power, the company says. It has a Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) of 1.6 million hours.
In the unrelated removable storage market, ProStor is extending its high-capacity removable disk drives to make them more suitable as a replacement for tape media in workstations and servers for small and midsize markets. The new RDX cartridges have a capacity of 160 GB, a 33 percent increase over previous drives. RDX media is available in 40, 80, 120 and 160 Gbyte capacities and can be substituted for tape media - tape maker Imation makes RDX drives under licence, as does Tandberg. The new 160Gbyte RDX cartridges are backward and forward compatible with all RDX drives. The RDX cartridges and drives can back up more than 125 Gbyte of data per hour and archive data for as long as ten years.
