Seagate Cuts Disk Energy Consumption

June 26, 2007: Seagate is squeezing even more capacity and energy savings into its latest line of network storage drives, claiming that the new Cheetah NS has been developed with mission critical enterprise storage applications in mind.

The company has taken its Cheetah 15k.5 platform and cut power consumption back with its new PowerTrim technology, a set of proprietary features that reduce drive's overall power consumption to as little as eight watts. This translates to a 34 percent power reduction at idle as well, and 33 percent when operating compared to standard 10,000 RPM drives.

Seagate says that drive delivers higher IOPS performance when compared with standard 10K-rpm drives. It has a seek time 3.9 ms, a 10 percent improvement in random performance, up to 23 percent better sequential performance, and is compatible with 3Gb/sec Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and 4Gb/sec Fibre Channel.

The company also claims that thanks to this shiny new tech and a 33 percent increase in capacity (bringing it up to 400GB), the Cheetah NS offers the lowest price and watts per-gigabyte for enterprise disk storage.

“The Cheetah NS, with its energy-saving PowerTrim technology, complements Seagate's enterprise drive lineup to provide the high capacity, reliability, and performance required for network storage,” said Sherman Black, senior vice president and general manager, Seagate Enterprise Compute business.

Seagate claims the drive sports a 1.4 million hour Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and expects it to be available in the third quarter of 2007. Pricing is yet to be released.

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