First 10,000rpm SFF HDD at 600GB

Seagate Technology announced worldwide shipments of its Savvio 10K.4 hard disk drive, the world’s highest-capacity and most reliable 2.5-inch enterprise-class drive. Built for the demands of enterprise servers and to enable new levels of data density in external storage arrays, Savvio 10K.4 doubles the capacity of its nearest competitor to 600GB. It is also the first HDD to achieve an unprecedented 2 million hours Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) reliability rating.

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As the industry’s only fourth generation, field-proven, 2.5-inch HDD designed for the enterprise, Savvio 10K.4 also features Protection Information for enhanced protection of data-in-flight, a self-encrypting drive (SED) option for the ultimate protection of sensitive data-at-rest and PowerChoice, which allows the Savvio 10K.4 hard drive to deliver improved power savings during idle.

“Our customers face challenging storage needs requiring the most efficient use of space and power while maintaining the highest performance possible,” said Howard Shoobe, senior manager, Dell Storage Product Management. “The new 2.5-inch 10K-rpm 600GB capacity point allows a doubling of capacity within the same rack space of current 3.5-inch 15K 600GB drives while increasing overall system-level performance and decreasing power usage.”

The combined features of Savvio 10K.4 deliver greater overall value and can reduce the total cost of ownership to IT organizations and administrators eager to optimize their data center’s power and performance efficiency. Leveraging the enterprise 2.5-inch small form factor as its platform, Savvio 10K.4 serves as a powerful storage building block when compared to 3.5-inch based systems.

“A transition to 2.5-inch enterprise-class HDDs by server and storage system OEMs is building momentum,” said John Rydning, IDC’s research director for hard disk drives. “There continues to be nearly insatiable demand for digital content accessed via numerous applications and devices, content that is increasingly delivered from storage systems equipped with high capacity enterprise-class HDDs such as Seagate’s Savvio 10K.4.”

Comments

This 10K.4 with three platters and six heads - also offered at 450GB with five heads - is the second-generation of Savvio with 6Gbs SAS interface and dual-port communication, as well as being the first SFF HDD with (4Gb) FC support. Now it reaches the same 600GB mark as the highest capacity 10,000rpm 3.5-inch HDD from Seagate, the Cheetah NS.2 10K, with the same two interfaces and lower 1.6 million hour MTBF. Another user's choice could be also the recently announced Seagate's RealSSD C300 SSD in 2.5-inch form factor but only 7mm high, with up to 256GB and 6Gb SATA.

The TCG-compliant, self-encrypting 10K.4 is only available on SAS models.

The former Savvio 10K.3 was at 300GB and 10,000rpm on two platters with the same 14.8mm height and SAS 2.0 interface only.

Looking at the competitors in SFF units at 10,000rpm, the HGST Ultrastar C10K300 and the Toshiba/Fujitsu MBD2300RC have a maximum capacity of 300GB, with SAS and no FC. There is also a 10,000rpm model from WD at 300GB capacity but with SATA interface only.