Seagate first to unveil super fast 2.5" drives
Seagate first to unveil super fast 2.5" drives
Seagate is hoping that enterprises around the world will embrace this new generation disc drive, which will store data more quickly, offer greater capacity although it takes up 70 percent less space than a 3-inch discs drive.
Seagate is hoping that enterprises around the world will embrace this new generation disc drives, which stores data more quickly, offers greater capacity although it takes up 70 percent less space than 3-inch discs drives.
The Savvio (short for Savvy and I/O) is the first family of 2.5-inch enterprise-class disc drives. The aerial density of the magnetic surfaces of the discs has been increased recently, which has allowed Seagate to store more bits and bytes onto the surface.
The Enterprises currently all use 3.5-inch drives, with 20 million distributed each year by vendors. But Graham Penn, Director of Storage Research for the Asia/Pacific, believes that the market is ready for this new generation of disc drives:
"You only introduce a new generation of technology if you are addressing a problem, or otherwise people won't buy it. So, on the one hand, we have got bottlenecks of performance. The 3.5-inch drive can deliver to a certain level, but there are bottlenecks when you put them into arrays. They need more arms for faster I/Os.
What we will find with these 2.5-inch drives is that you can pack more drives into a given space, therefore you have got more actuators operating every day to get the data off faster. There is also an issue of cooling in the environment. These new generation drives will run cooler.
The pressure point for end-users is the capacity of the driver per swindle on one hand, verses the capacity in the current system. We will find that the densification of the 2.5-inch drivers will enable them to take more storage in a cubic area, rack or disc array."
He believes that the huge increase of storing data in enterprises will pave the way for success of these new drives. More drives will be able to be fitted on the rack, increasing I/Os.
But problems are forseen in the legacy infrastructure, built around 3.5 inch discs. This will have to change. New connections will have to be incorporated, replacing the old SCSI, and fibre based interface on an enterprise drive. They will give way to new connectivities, such as Serial ATA and serial SCSI connections too. However, new 2.5 inch drives will also have to co-exist with old 3.5 inch drives initially for the data to be transferred.
Enterprises will be pleased to hear that the drives will be built to a higher specification than the drives built for Notebooks and desktops, increasing longevity and reliability.
John Monroe, a research vice president at Gartner is very optimistic about the success of this disc: "Space and power are increasingly regarded as corporate assets that must be managed and preserved, and more and more users are demanding that servers and storage systems take up less physical space and consumer less power.
"New breeds of 2.5-inch high-performance drives will enable evolving enterprise systems to deliver enhanced speed and reliability while reducing power and space requirements. The shift to a new enterprise HDD form factor is inevitable and inescapable. Gartner predicts that 2.5-inch enterprise-class drives will be the predominant HHD form factor in multi-user environments in 2007."
The Savivio disc drives will be available in a one and two platter design providing 36 GB and 73 GB capacities, with 10,000 rpm, whilst being 15 percent faster.
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