Seagate Technology on Monday unveiled its third generation Savvio hard disk drives designed for enterprises and also the world’s first small form-factor HDDs with Serial Attached SCSI 750MB/s interface. The new hard drives will be available in the second half of the year and will fit into the general trend towards lower power consumption thanks to enlarged capacity and PowerTrim technology.

“Seagate was the pioneer of the 2.5” form-factor enterprise standard, stemming from work with customers to better understand data center requirements, including the need for greater storage performance density, while continuing to focus on reducing power consumption and cooling costs. Now, with the introduction of the 300GB Savvio 10K.3 drive, more versatile storage systems can be built based upon this sweet-spot capacity,” said Sherman Black, senior vice president and general manager of Seagate enterprise compute business.

Seagate Savvio 2.5” hard disk drives boast with up to 300GB storage capacity, 10 000rpm spindle speed, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 6Gb/s (750MB/s) interface, Full Disk Encryption (FDE) data protection as well as PowerTrim technology that manages drive power consumption during idle activity. Seagate claims that its Savvio 10K.3 hard drive offers 1.6 million hours mean time between failures (MTBF), which is inline with previous-generation enterprise drives from the company.

Major OEM evaluations of the Savvio 10K.3 drive have begun. General product availability is planned for the second half of calendar year 2008.

“The combination of higher capacity and 6Gb SAS on an enterprise-class small form-factor disk drive, like the Savvio 10K.3 drive, continues to entice the industry to move from 3.5” to 2.5” based solutions for use in enterprise storage systems and arrays. IDC predicts that shipments of small form-factor enterprise drives into enterprise solutions will outnumber 3.5” enterprise drive shipments by 2010,” said Dave Reinsel, vice president of storage research at IDC.