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Hard disk makers aim for speed bump

http://www.techcentral.ie/article.aspx?id=12181

Seagate and Western Digital line up new drives

Computers & Peripherals | 09 Jun 2008 :



Hard disk manufacturers Seagate and Western Digital have introduced new drives aimed at increasing performance and capacity for enterprise servers, storage and netbooks.

Seagate is to introduce a new member of its Savvio family of hard disks later this year. The Savvio 10K.3 hard drive is a small form factor, 10,000rpm, 2.5-inch device with a capacity of 300GB targeted at enterprise storage and servers. Seagate said it offers 70 per cent lower power and a 60 per cent input/output operations per second (IOPS) performance increase, compared to traditional 3.5-inch drives.

The self-encrypting Savvio 10K.3 also comes with government-grade Full Disk Encryption (FDE). Seagate claimed an estimated mean time between failures (MTBF) of 1.6 million hours for the new drive.

Seagate is also integrating its PowerTrim technology into Savvio drives which manages drive power consumption during idle activity, which should help IT managers save power in energy-constrained datacentres.

The Savvio 10k.3 also boasts a data transfer rate of 6GB/s, thanks to its inclusion of the new serial attached SCSI (SAS) 2.0 specification. This contains extra signal and data integrity features designed to tempt enterprise users away from older Ultra320 SCSI technology - which uses a parallel rather than a serial interface.

SAS vendors also point to increased improved reliability and fault detection with SAS drives, as well as its ability to operate with lower performance serial ATA (SATA) drives. Mixing SAS and SATA drives allows firms to create tiered storage architectures combining higher performance SAS drives for accessing frequently required content, and SATA drives for content required less frequently.

The Savvio 10K.3 is planned for general availability in the second half of 2008.

Meanwhile, Western Digital is to introduce a new range of hard drives, aiming to boost the performance of notebooks and personal storage devices.

It's new family of 7,200 rpm, 2.5-inch SATA hard drives, the Scorpio Black, will offer 320GB storage capacity while consuming less power, WD claimed.

Scorpio black drives have a data transfer of 3GB/s and a 16MB cache for data buffering, as well as benefiting from other WD trademark features, such as IntelliSeek for calculating optimum seek speeds to achieve lower power consumption, vibration and noise. Other WD trademark features include SecurePark for improving long term reliability by 'parking' the read/write heads off the disk surface when the disk spins up or down during data access.

For drive protection, WD has included ShockGuard and a built in free-fall sensor, which detects if the drive is dropped during use; it can park the disk read/write heads off the disk surface to reduce damage in less than 200ms.