Seagate Introduces First Small Form Factor 15K Enterprise HDD

Small form factor enterprise family expands, adding highest performance density while maintaining reliability and low power consumption for a broad range of enterprise applications

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.-January 16, 2007 – Seagate Technology (NYSE:STX) today introduced the world's fastest hard drive – the Savvio 15K drive, the new 15K-rpm addition to the Savvio family of 2.5-inch Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) enterprise drive solutions. The Savvio 15K drive provides the highest hard drive performance density and reliability while ensuring ultra-low power consumption, reducing thermal loads in data centers. With its combination of benefits that were created for modern storage systems, the Savvio 15K drive is well-suited for a broad range of mainstream enterprise applications in both large enterprise data centers and small, medium businesses, that lowers overall system Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

‘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 Compute Business. ‘The development of the 2.5-inch 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-inch to 2.5-inch form factor enterprise solutions.’

The Savvio 15K drive was recently validated as the world's fastest drive within the latest HP ProLiant family of servers. HP ProLiant servers with 15K Savvio drives are shipping in volume and are leading the transition of small form factor drives in mainstream enterprise environments.

‘The Seagate Savvio 15K drives running in HP ProLiant servers and storage devices delivered record-breaking benchmarks at nearly 50 percent lower cost-per-transaction,’ said Paul Perez, vice president, Storage, Networks and Infrastructure, HP. ‘The performance, reliability and power consumption benefits of deploying 2.5-inch Small Form Factor 15K drives are clear, and HP continues to drive the industry transition to them as the principal storage platform inside the HP ProLiant and BladeSystem solutions.’

The Savvio 15K drive's unique combination of features including its 70 percent smaller size, lower power consumption (30 percent lower than any other 15K drive), industry's fastest seek time and the industry's highest reliability, make it the ideal storage solution for all server platforms. Designed from the ground up to meet the demanding requirements of enterprise applications, Savvio achieves the highest reliability rating ever with a 1.6 million hour Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF).

The Industry Shift to the 2.5-inch Enterprise Standard
The move to small form factor enterprise disk drives was driven by data center requirements for greater storage performance density while focusing on lowering power consumption and cooling costs. Seagate pioneered the 2.5-inch platform as the solution to these challenges and formally announced this move in May of 2003 with the support of HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and others. The inclusion of the 15K-rpm model to the Savvio family of drives marks it as a mainstream offering.

‘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-inch 15K-rpm HDD is fitting with this trend, delivering fast I/O performance in a small package to meet the needs of demanding server applications.’

Savvio Drive Technical Details
The 15K-rpm Savvio disc drive offers a number of advantages over 15K-rpm 3.5-inch drives including: size (70% smaller), weight (1.12 lbs less), power (30% lower), drive seek time (12% faster than any other drive) and reliability (1.6 million hour MTBF). These advantages translate into system level benefits never before seen in a 15K-rpm drive.

The Savvio 15K drive was built to accommodate a wide range of applications, from grueling, rapid-fire data access brought forth in transactional environments to everyday e-mail/collaboration. The combination of high performance and reliability enables the use of 20% fewer Savvio 15K drives within a system to gain the necessary transaction performance, which ultimately means lower TCO.

Savvio Drive Availability
The Seagate Savvio 10K and 15K families of drives are shipping today. Savvio 10K.2 and 15K drives are currently available through several leading OEM customers. The Savvio 10K.2 drive will launch in the Distribution Channel this quarter as a replacement product for Savvio 10K.1 and as a transition path from Cheetah 10K.7 drives. The Savvio 10K.2 drive provides the highest capacity choices to the family with up to 146GB, while the Savvio 15K.1 drive is ideal for the most transaction-intensive applications.

HP is first to qualify and ship systems with Savvio 15K drives. Savvio 15K drives ship in the SAS interface at 36GB and 73GB capacities, the ideal sizes to meet the IOPS-intensive performance requirements of enterprise server environments. For more information about Savvio drives, in addition to Seagate's other enterprise storage solutions, visit www.seagate.com.