When it comes to enterprise-grade hard drives, smaller is turning out to be better-and for a lot of reasons.
Seagate, the world's highest-volume producer of HHDs, Feb. 9 began shipping a new 600GB, 2.5-inch enterprise drive to its OEMs that runs at 10,000 rpm. Most enterprise drives run at 5,400 or 7,200 rpm.
Seagate said the Savvio 10K.4 features twice the capacity of previous drives, despite its smaller size-thanks to marked improvements in areal densities from the disk makers during the last six or so years.
And, thanks to improvements in HHD architecture, the Savvio 10K.4 is said to be able to deliver about 200K hours MTBF (mean time between failure) reliability. Standard drives have MTBFs in the 50K- to 100K-hour range.
Because the new drives offer double capacity in about the same rack space as the larger drives, IT managers can install more smaller-yet denser-drives in the racks for about the same power and space.
Since 2.5-inch spinning-disk drives are smaller than standard devices, they require less electricity and thus are cheaper to run. They also radiate less heat and require less cooling-saving more power costs.
Seagate also said that the Savvio 10K.4 (10,000 rpm, fourth generation) also features enhanced protection of data in flight, optional self-encryption and spin-down for power savings during idle time.
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