Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 will be the first 3.5″ harddrive on the market sporting perpendicular recording, a technology with frequent appearances here at NH. Perpendicular recording is already quite common with 2.5″ hardrives and makes it possible to store more data on the same surface as conventional technology. This is done by storing the data vertically instead of horizontally. Now that Seagate has moved the technology to its Cheetah 15K.5 series the effect is very obvious; from an earlier peak capacity at 146GB it has now revealed a 300GB drive. And then we’re talking about a 15 000 RPM SCSI hardrive, the biggest 15K harddrive ever. According to Seagate it’s not just the storage capacity that has been moved to new levels though, but also the performance is suppose to be something completely extraordinary.
“The Cheetah 15K.5 leveraged Seagate’s R&D leadership to create the world’s first enterprise hard drive with perpendicular recording. Perpendicular recording technology lets the Cheetah 15K.5 deliver twice the capacity of 15K drives currently available while providing a performance increase over previous generations by as large as 30%.”
Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 is so far only available for OEM customers, but is expected to be released on the consumer market later this quarter.
“The Cheetah 15K.5 is available in a choice of 3 Gb/sec Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Ultra320 SCSI, and 4 Gb/sec Fibre Channel interfaces with capacities of 73, 147, and 300 gigabytes. It delivers an industry-leading Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) reliability rating of 1.4 million hours at full duty cycle.”
Seagate has really raised the bar on the SCSI market with its new Cheetah 15K.5 series, but we are still waiting for the perpendicular recording drives to actually find its way onto the desktop market.
Source: Seagate
