Seagate Announces New Cheetah 15K.7 and Cheetah NS.2 Hard Drives

[malware]

Seagate today announced two new members of its award-winning Cheetah enterprise-class hard drive family: the Cheetah 15K.7 hard drive and the Cheetah NS.2 hard drive. Current economic challenges have put even more focus on reducing spending to ensure long-term business sustainability. For businesses that have an existing investment based on a standard 3.5-inch enterprise infrastructure, the new Cheetah drives bolster sustainability through easy drive/system integration, and provide improved levels of system performance, capacity, reliability, and lower power consumption.




In support of sustaining the environment, where reduce, reuse and recycle are keys to this best practice, Cheetah drives reduce power consumption, drive replacement costs, and costs per GB. Built for 3.5-inch Tier 1 storage applications, the Cheetah 15K.7 drive and the Cheetah NS.2 drive are the largest capacity mission-critical drives offered at 600GB, and have the highest reliability in the industry. The Cheetah 15K.7 drive delivers the highest performance of any 3.5-inch drive, while the Cheetah NS.2 drive takes power-savings to the furthest extreme by featuring the lowest power requirement of any 3.5-inch Tier 1 drive.

Both drives feature 2 nd-generation PowerTrim technology, which dynamically optimizes drive power consumption at all levels of activity. Using PowerTrim technology, the Cheetah NS.2 drive provides power savings of over 20% when compared to its prior generation design.

“Seagate recognizes IT budgets are constrained, and these new 3.5-inch Cheetah drives are aimed directly at helping enable many businesses sensibly grow and scale as their information needs continue, while at the same time providing the reliability required to avoid costly interruption or downtime,” said Sherman Black, senior vice president, Seagate Core HDD Marketing and Strategy. “While many organizations are making the transition to 2.5-inch enterprise-class drives which include the Seagate Savvio ® drive family, 3.5-inch Cheetah drives are the leading standard for existing enterprise systems. Seagate remains committed to serving the market with a full lineup of storage solutions for a broad range of needs and budgets.”

“External storage system OEMs continue to consume the majority of 3.5-inch performance-optimized HDDs shipped each quarter, whereas server manufacturers consumed nearly all of the 2.5-inch SFF performance-optimized HDDs that shipped in 2008,” according to John Rydning, IDC’s research director for hard disk drives. “Seagate’s new 3.5-inch Cheetah disk drives with up to 600GBs of capacity will fill a critical need for both its customers and end users looking to extend the life of existing external storage system platforms.”

“It’s a core tenet of Dell’s philosophy to offer our customers the best technology and services solutions to meet their needs,” said Praveen Asthana, director of Dell Storage. “By offering a selection of these new drives from Seagate, we are able to provide our customers Tier 1 reliability at 600GB while empowering them to place their own priority on performance and power consumption.”

The Cheetah 15K.7 and the Cheetah NS.2 drives are the second generation of Cheetah drives available as Self-Encrypting Drives for designated OEMs, providing government-grade data security, and instant secure erase for drives repurposed, reused, recycled, or returned for expired lease, repair or warranty.

“Many organizations are considering drive-level security for its simplicity in helping secure sensitive data through the hardware lifecycle from initial setup, to upgrade transitions and disposal,” said Eric Ouellet, Gartner research vice president.

Cheetah 15K.7 Drive Specifications
Capacity 600, 450, 300GB
Interface 6Gb/s SAS-2.0, 4Gb/s FC
Spindle Speed 15,000 RPM
Seek Time 3.4 ms
Reliability 0.55% AFR / 1.6M hours MTBF
Cache 16MB
Form factor 3.5-inch

Cheetah NS.2 Drive Specifications
Capacity 600, 450, 300GB
Interface 6Gb/s SAS-2.0 (600 and 450 GB drives), 4Gb/s FC
Spindle Speed 10,000 RPM
Seek Time 3.8 ms
Reliability 0.55% AFR / 1.6M hours MTBF
Cache 16MB
Form factor 3.5-inch

The Cheetah NS.2 drive is available and shipping today.

The Cheetah 15K.7 drive is currently available for OEM qualifications and will start shipping next quarter to the channel.

Source: Seagate

[The Witcher]

15k Rpm

I WANT IT, I WANT IT

I bet its gonna be really hot and loud not to mention the price, it must be $400+ for the 600GB.

EDIT : I take back my price guessing, I found the Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 36.7 GB for $120~250 O_o

So imagine how much will the new version cost, probably more than $1000 or $1500 for the 600GB.

I don't know if this really worth it.

[spearman914]

It's SAS!! It's gonna be extremely fast if u raid them, lucky it wasn't SCSI because those are crap.

[Steevo]

Each drive can probalby sustain over 190MBps read rate. Well worth the price for the storage, reliability, and versatility.

[Weer]

Is there any point to this with SSD's out?

[J-Man]

Which is better? 15k rpm Cheetahs or SSD's?

[timta2]

Originally Posted by spearman914

It's SAS!! It's gonna be extremely fast if u raid them, lucky it wasn't SCSI because those are crap.

It's (SAS) Serial Attached SCSI. Its a modern day serial replacement for parallel SCSI. In its day there was nothing that could touch its performance (and frustration level!).

[Melvis]

Very expensive drives, im sure i remember seeing these for over a grand for the biggest one, id still take a Raptor X i so want one.

[pr0n Inspector]

Originally Posted by Weer

Is there any point to this with SSD's out?

is this a joke?

[iiee]

Pro and Con for Raid with SAS.

I have Adaptec 31205 PCIe x8 running raid0 4x 15k.5. It is extremely annoying when it boots, it takes 50 seconds to start the card and detect disk array. In addition this process must be gone through before I can enter the motherboard bios, can u imagine how difficult it is to make adjustment for overclocking and testing.

After booting into windows, the benchmark is beautiful. HDtech graph is almost straight through out at 300mb/s limit (final average 299.x). Using only 2 hdd will not achieve this.

Not sure about raid0 with onboard SAS in latest x58 board. Thats for 2 hdd only i think.

[Weer]

Originally Posted by pr0n Inspector

is this a joke?

No. These 15k HDD's simply try to get better seek times. SSD's basically beat the shit out of any HDD. If they made 50k HDD's they would still pale in comparison.

So.. what is the point? Please, if you know - tell me!

[pr0n Inspector]

Originally Posted by Weer

No. These 15k HDD's simply try to get better seek times. SSD's basically beat the shit out of any HDD. If they made 50k HDD's they would still pale in comparison.

So.. what is the point? Please, if you know - tell me!

they won't wear out in a month when used in a SERVER?

*not to mention they write much faster than SSD and much cheaper too.

[Weer]

Originally Posted by pr0n Inspector

they won't wear out in a month when used in a SERVER?

What is this "server" you speak of..? I use a PC. Have ya heard of 'em?

[Weer]

Originally Posted by pr0n Inspector

*not to mention they write much faster than SSD

Bah. I really barely see a difference between the write bandwidth of my RAID0 arrays and my stand-alone HDD's. Not to mention I find it almost useless when a single HDD can get 70-100MB these days.

[pr0n Inspector]

these are SAS drives. they are aimed at enterprise market.

[pr0n Inspector]

I found an interesting article on Tom's
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...-ssd,1971.html (the Cheetah they used was the older 15K.5)

and I was wrong, enterprise class SSDs actually write as fast as HDDs.

[FordGT90Concept]

Originally Posted by J-Man

Which is better? 15k rpm Cheetahs or SSD's?

Cheetah. Why? They can take a crapload of abuse (trillions of read/write cycles), they are reliable (1,000,000 hour MTBF is the norm), and they are dependable (nothing short of an EMP or very strong magnet will make them entirely lose their data). I don't know of any enterprise situation where SSD is taken seriously yet...


We can't forget density/manufacture costs too. Because hard drives are mostly about technique, their density can increase with refinements on the hardware front--nothing major. On the other hand, SSDs rely on microscopic gates. The more memory there is, the more complex it gets. The only saving grace for any kind of memory manufacturer is reductions in process type.

We'll see what happens in the next decade. I can't see hard drives going anywhere any time soon because of the above remark. If you want a lot of capacity, you have to pony up with SSD. With HDDs, capacity concerns are practically a thing of the past for most users.