Author: Chaz Nichols, Global Channel Marketing and Kent Bransford, Sr. Technical Editor,
Seagate Technology
“Use the right tool for the job” is a time-honored maxim that’s particularly relevant to developers and system builders seeking to deliver maximum value to their customers. Data center storage requirements continue to expand and diversify, challenging IT professionals to move beyond the traditional “speed or capacity” dichotomy to also address such issues as power consumption, system cooling, data center footprint, ease of data migration and more.
Efficiently meeting such a broad spectrum of storage requirements with only a narrow range of hard disk drives (HDDs) from which to choose is simply not possible…a fact to which many storage professionals can ruefully attest. In response to this dilemma, Seagate has recently made four compelling additions to its comprehensive Savvio, Cheetah and Barracuda ES enterprise disk drive families.
Storage solutions play a fundamental role in shaping data center footprint, power and cooling profiles, and Seagate has purpose-built its new Savvio 15K, Cheetah 15K.6, Cheetah NAS and Barracuda ES.2 Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives to maximize data center ROI. By combining superior performance and capacity with significantly reduced space and energy requirements, Seagate HDDs enable you to build higher performing, greener and more eco-friendly systems.
Seagate Savvio 15K SAS
Simply put, the 2.5-inch Savvio 15K is the fastest disk drive ever offered by Seagate. Not only is Savvio 15K
10 percent faster than 3.5-inch 15K drives and 35 percent faster than 2.5-inch 10K drives, it also achieves the highest reliability rating ever attained by a Seagate drive (1.6 million hours MTBF). For developers and system builders who must deliver the absolute pinnacle of performance and reliability, Savvio 15K is the obvious choice.
But the benefits of the Savvio 15K HDD go far beyond blazing speed and rock-solid durability. Because it’s 70 percent smaller than 3.5-inch drives, Savvio 15K enables integration of more drives into smaller, more space-efficient systems to deliver higher performance per U and lower TCO. And because Savvio 15K uses 30 percent less power, it creates less heat, lowers system temperatures and reduces cooling costs.
Developers and system builders will enjoy greater flexibility to design more competitive solutions thanks to the smaller size, lower power consumption, superior performance and unrivaled reliability of Savvio 15K drives.
Key Features and Benefits
- Fastest, most reliable Seagate disk drive ever manufactured
- Compact size enables more drives to boost system performance density
- Best non-recoverable error rate of any Seagate HDD (improved by a factor of 10) rigorously safeguards data
- More drives per system than 3.5-inch drives allows RAID 5, or mirroring with hot spares, in 1U servers; brings enterprise-class reliability to blade servers
- More performance per U, per GB and per watt than any other Seagate drive
Seagate Cheetah 15K.6 SAS
Designed to deliver maximum capacity and reliability in mission-critical storage applications, the Seagate Cheetah 15K.6 is Seagate’s highest-performing 3.5-inch disk drive, with a maximum sustained transfer rate of 164 MB/sec. Second-generation perpendicular recording technology enables up to 450 GB of storage capacity, allied with the highest reliability rating (1.6 million hours MTBF) of any Seagate 3.5-inch HDD.
The Cheetah 15K.6 drive also includes Seagate PowerTrim™ technology, which dynamically optimizes drive power consumption at all levels of activity. PowerTrim enables Cheetah 15K.6 to deliver the highest performance in its class without increasing power consumption. Compared to its acclaimed predecessor, Cheetah 15K.6 lowers idle and operational power requirements (by as much as 61 percent in watts/GB) while boosting overall sustained data transfer rates by 28 percent.
Combining extraordinary sequential and transactional performance with vast storage capacity, the Seagate Cheetah 15K.6 drive is ideal for mission-critical SAN, NAS, transactional processing and Internet applications.
Key Features and Benefits
- Second-generation perpendicular recording delivers up to 450 GB of storage capacity
- Unprecedented performance with a sustained data rate of up to 164 MB/sec
- Seagate’s highest 3.5-inch drive reliability at 1.6 million hours MTBF
- PowerTrim technology provides 61 percent improvement in watts/GB at idle
- Advanced read/write technology reduces non-recoverable error rate to 1x10E16.
Seagate Cheetah NAS SAS
The Cheetah NS drive was developed for mission-critical enterprise network storage applications where maximum storage capacity and the lowest power consumption are needed. Purpose-built to meet these requirements, the Cheetah NS provides Seagate’s lowest price-per-gigabyte and best watts-per-gigabyte value for the enterprise.
Leveraged from the Cheetah 15K.5 platform, the Cheetah NS is a new 10K-RPM disk drive that delivers best-in-class capacity, energy savings and performance when compared to standard 3.5-inch 10K RPM enterprise HDDs. Now IT professionals can easily optimize their enterprise systems for capacity or performance: Cheetah 15K.6 for the highest IOPS-per-gigabyte transactional performance in its class, or Cheetah NS for the best capacity and price-per-gigabyte available in mission-critical enterprise storage.
Boasting up to 33% more capacity (to a maximum of 400 GB) and a 33% reduction in power and cooling requirements compared to previous Cheetah 10K drives, the new Cheetah NS ultimately delivers the lowest TCO for a wide range of mission-critical enterprise network storage applications.
Key Features and Benefits
- Uses proven perpendicular recording technology to boost available storage capacity (up to 400 GB)
- Reducing spin speed from 15K to 10K RPM while maintaining Cheetah 15K.5 platter size enables 33 percent power reduction compared to previous 10K drives
- Higher IOPS performance than standard 10K-rpm drives; random performance increased by 10%, sequential performance boosted by up to 23%
- Faster transactional performance cuts RAID rebuild times, and 10X improvement in non-recoverable error rate protects against secondary rebuild errors
- Designed for reliability in demanding enterprise workloads with 1.4 million hours MTBF and 0.62 percent AFR
Seagate Barracuda ES.2 SAS
The Barracuda ES.2 SAS enterprise disk drive is designed for high-density RAID and nearline applications where enormous capacity, high reliability, low-power consumption and tolerance to rotational vibration (RV) are primary requirements. Utilizing second-generation Seagate perpendicular recording technology, the Barracuda ES SAS drive provides up to one terabyte of storage in a single, four-platter HDD, ideal for business-critical applications where dollars per GB and GB per watt are primary metrics.
Barracuda ES SAS employs integrated workload management to enhance drive cooling during periods of prolonged activity. Seagate’s PowerTrim technology dynamically optimizes power consumption, improving GB/watt by 55 percent and reducing overall drive power consumption by 20 percent over prior-generation Barracuda ES drives without any host interaction or performance loss. Barracuda ES.2 is available with a choice of either Serial ATA (SATA) or SAS interfaces for optimal system integration.
The SAS interface of Barracuda ES.2 drives enables them to be freely attached to any SAS host in single- or dual-ported configurations and provides complete full-duplex support, with two active data channels, to as many as 16 concurrent initiators.
Key Features and Benefits
- Optimized for multi-drive, business-critical nearline applications, with up to 1 TB capacity (33 percent more than its predecessor) on a single four-platter drive
- SAS interface enables seamless migration of aging Tier 1 transactional data to more cost-effective Tier 2 nearline storage
- Seagate’s highest-reliability 7200-RPM drive, designed for 24×7 operation
- Superior RV tolerance ensures unrivalled performance in high spindle-density applications; multi-drive firmware maximizes system availability
- Full internal IOEDC/IOECC data integrity protection
Conclusion
Recognizing the wide spectrum of applications that storage professionals must cost-effectively address, Seagate has responded with a comprehensive range of purpose-built disk drives for the enterprise. The new Seagate Savvio 15K, Cheetah 15K.6, Cheetah NAS and Barracuda ES SAS drives simultaneously address the growing need for greater space and energy efficiency while significantly boosting storage capacity and performance. Seagate will continue to deliver the premier disk drive solutions that the enterprise needs to maximize data center ROI while also enabling companies to deploy greener, more eco-friendly systems.
