The launch of Seagate’s latest 15,000 rpm 2.5” form factor hard disk drive has set several new records in its class. At 900GB it is the highest capacity available for that market sector, as well as the fastest data throughput.
With the speed of data storage devices critical for many applications, particularly within a data centre, Seagate have pushed the 2.5” form factor to new levels of performance for a drive spinning at 15k rpm. This would appear to be in response to the growing pressure from SSD technology, now becoming increasingly popular, even within some data centre applications.
The 900GB capacity is a 50% increase from the previous model, at just 600GB, which providing a 27% increase in sustained data transfer speeds and a 100% increase in random write performance. To remain competitive improved data caching has been introduced.
For a hard disk drive using 2.5” platters spinning at 15k the areal density is reported to be almost at a maximum, with many commentators suggesting this may be the last drive manufactured by Seagate in this sector of the market. The difference in the price of high speed enterprise level hard disk drives and SSDs is rapidly decreasing, putting further pressure on traditional spinning drives.
