In the world of hard-drive technology, Seagate has unveiled a stunner. Today, the California-based storage  company introduced what could likely be the world's fastest hard drive -- the Savvio 15K, the newest member of the Savvio brood of 2.5-inch drives designed for enterprise applications.
Seagate, one of the pioneers in developing the 2.5-inch format, is hoping to replace the more widely used 3.5-inch format with the smaller drives. And that progression appears to be imminent, according to industry experts.
"The trend in I.T. is to scale down the physical size of components while scaling up capacity and performance," John Rydning, IDC's research manager for hard disk drives, said in a statement published on Seagate's Web site.
Going Green
The new drive boasts a 2.9-millisecond seek time and a spindle speed of 15,000 RPM, but perhaps the coolest feature of the new drive is what it doesn't do -- suck up a lot of energy .
According to Seagate, the Savvio 15K uses 30 percent less power than any other 15K drive. This reduction can equal huge savings in big data centers, according to Dianne McAdam, director of enterprise information assurance for The Clipper Group, a Massachusetts-based technology consulting firm.
"A lot of these large data centers want to be more energy efficient," she said. "Clearly, all large data centers are looking at ways to save power and bring in equipment that saves power."
While the new drives are certainly faster, she said, the green factor is just as critical.
Spin Me Right Round
Just how much of a power wallop are we talking about? The 15,000 RPM speed is usually what you see on a performance drive. Most enterprise-class hard drives for use in data centers typically spin at 10,000 RPM and are designed for capacity, not performance.
What is so interesting about the Savvio 15K, said McAdam, is its ability to pack so much into a tiny device. "It's so small, and yet so much more powerful," she said.
Seagate has said that the 2.5-inch platform represents a new way of thinking -- the ability to pack more punch into a smaller machine. McAdam said she agrees with that sentiment, but stressed the "greening of the data center" as the real breakthrough.
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