Seagate Technology today unveiled the world’s first 2.5” hard disk drive for enterprise storage applications with 10 000rpm motor. The company plans to start produce the part in quantities soon and eventually transit it to Serial Attached SCSI interface.

With the trend towards minimizing servers and data storage applications it becomes crucial to offer high-performance low-size HDDs that would allow accumulating more data using less space and without affecting performance. Numerous companies are developing 2.5” HDDs to address those need, one of them is Seagate Technology, others are Hitachi Global Storage Division, Samsung Electronics, Fujitsu and Maxtor.

The new Savvio hard disk drives will be available in 36GB and 73GB versions. Savvio will be offered in 3 interfaces, UltraWide SCSI, Fiber-Channel and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) - the latest evolution of SCSI that is based upon Serial ATA technology. Although Seagate demonstrated its 2.5” Serial Attached SCSI HDDs recently, the firm will only supply them in quantities in the second half of the year.

Savvio 2.5”, 10,000 rpm disc drives offer a number of advantages over 10 000rpm 3.5-inch drives including: size (70% smaller); weight (1.12 lbs less); power (40% lower); drive seek time (15% faster); interface (3 options – Fiber-Channel, Ultra320 SCSI and SAS); and reliability (1.4 million hour MTBF). These advantages translate into system level benefits never before seen in a 10 000rpm drive.

General availability for Savvio will be at the end of the second calendar quarter of 2004. Savvio with SAS is schedule for late Q3 2004.