News

posted on 04 March 2008 08:30

Seagate is now shipping its fastest-ever 3.5-inch Cheetah disk drive. It holds up to 450GB.

Seagate says the drive is 28 percent faster in sustained I/O data rate terms than the previous Cheetah generation and needs up to 61 percent less electricity to run, in both operational and idle modes. The drive has a Fibre Channel (FC) interface, also a serial-attached SCSI (SAS) one.

Seagate calls its power-saving technology PowerTrim and it dynamically optimises power consumption without compromising the drive's performance, witness the sustained I/O rate figure.

The lower electricity needed is computed in terms of watts/GB and is not an absolute figure. On this measure the 450GB model will be more power efficient than either the 300 or 147GB models although the absolute amount of power needed is probably identical across the three drives, given identical workloads. 

The new Cheetah uses second generation perpendicular recording technology and the capacity levels are 147, 300 and 450GB. It's MTBF is 1.6 million hours, which Seagate claims makes it the most reliable 3.5-inch drive in the industry. The company supplies it with a 5-year warranty.

HP is designing the FC drive into its EVA array product line and SuperMicro is building the SAS version into its product line. No prices were released.