Seagate Technology has announced what it claims to be “the world’s fastest hard drive” – the Savvio 15K with a seek time of a mere 2.9 ms. The new 15K-RPM addition to the Savvio family offers a number of advantages over 15K-rpm 3.5-inch drives including size and weight (due to 2.5-inch form factor), 30% decrease in power consumption (5.8 watts at idle), and reliability (1.6 million hour MTBF).

 “Seagate is committed to delivering solutions that will meet the needs of today’s demanding IT environment, and no product demonstrates this better than the Savvio 15K drive,” said Sherman Black, senior vice president and general manager, Seagate Enterprise Compute Business. “The development of the 2.5-inch Enterprise form factor represented a new way of thinking. Now, with the added number of performance and capacity choices offered, many of the leading enterprise system makers are transitioning from 3.5-inch to 2.5-inch form factor enterprise solutions.”

The move to small form factor enterprise disk drives was driven by data center requirements for greater storage performance density while focusing on lowering power consumption and cooling costs.

“The trend in IT is to scale down the physical size of components while scaling up capacity and performance,” said John Rydning, IDC’s research manager for hard disk drives. “Seagate’s first generation 2.5-inch 15K-rpm HDD is fitting with this trend, delivering fast I/O performance in a small package to meet the needs of demanding server applications.”

The Seagate Savvio 15K drives are shipping today in 36GB and 73GB capacities through OEM customers. HP is now shipping Proliant systems with 15K Savvio drives. The Savvio 10K.2 drive will launch in the channel this quarter as a replacement product for Savvio 10K.1 and as a transition path from Cheetah 10K.7 drives.