The world’s largest producer of hard disk drives (HDDs) – Seagate Technology – has formally announced the world’s first small form-factor hard drives with 15 000rpm speed. The new drive promises performance that is higher than any other hard disk can offer, the company indicated.

“Seagate is committed to delivering solutions that will meet the needs of today’s demanding IT environment, and no product demonstrates this better than the Savvio 15K drive,” said Sherman Black, senior vice president and general manager, Seagate enterprise computer business.

Seagate Savvio 15K HDDs that use 2.5” form-factor will be available in 36GB and 73GB capacities with 16MB buffer and will use Serial Attached SCSI interconnection. Seagate indicated that the new drive has 2.9ms average seek time, 5.8W power consumption and mean time between failure of 1.6 million hours, which means that the new Savvio 15K is promises to offer higher performance amid lower power consumption and higher reliability than 3.5” Cheetah 15K (3.5ms average seek time, 8.4W power consumption, MTBF of 1.4 million hours).

Both Seagate Savvio 15K and Seagate Cheetah 15K use perpendicular magnetic recording technology, however, given that the latter use larger platters, it also offers 146GB capacities.

“The development of the 2.5” enterprise form-factor represented a new way of thinking. Now, with the added number of performance and capacity choices offered, many of the leading enterprise system makers are transitioning from 3.5” to 2.5” form factor enterprise solutions,” Mr. Black added.

Seagate Savvio 15K hard disk drives are shipping now to HP, meanwhile shipments to other customers will begin already this quarter. Pricing of Seagate Savvio 15K 36GB and 73GB is also unknown.

“The trend in IT is to scale down the physical size of components while scaling up capacity and performance,” said John Rydning, IDC’s research manager for hard disk drives. “Seagate’s first generation 2.5” 15 000rpm HDD is fitting with this trend, delivering fast I/O performance in a small package to meet the needs of demanding server applications.”