Seagate Launches 300 GB 2.5-Inch Storage Hard Drive

Seagate on Monday introduced a 300-GB 2.5-inch hard drive for computer servers and storage arrays.

The Savvio 10K.3, which is more than double the capacity of its predecessor, consumes 70 percent less power and can hold more information than traditional 3.5-inch drives, according to Seagate. The drive has a speed of 10,000 revolutions per minute.

In addition, the product has a reliability rating of 1.6 million hours, which is the mean time between failures, and a SAS 2.0 interface, which delivers a data rate of 6 Gbit/s. The drive also has government-grade full disk encryption data protection. The high capacity and speed rates of smaller drives are luring companies away from 3.5-inch to 2.5-inch devices for enterprise storage systems. IDC predicts that shipments of the smaller drives will outnumber the larger models by 2010.

Seagate also makes two other 2.5-inch drives. The Savvio 10K.2 has a maximum storage capacity of 146 GB, and the Savvio 15K maxes out at 73 GB. The latter is built for mainstream enterprise applications and the former for rack-optimized servers and storage arrays, server blades, and 1U RAID servers.

The latest drive includes Seagate's PowerTrim technology, which manages drive power consumption during idle time. Pricing of the new product was not disclosed.For the consumer market, Seagate started shipping in April the 1-TB Barracuda ES.2 for storing multimedia content and data from collaborative applications, such as email. The drive has an unrecoverable error rate that is substantially improved over desktop-class drives with an average time between failures of 1.2 million hours at 24/7 data availability. The drive operates at 7,200 revolutions per minute and has average seek times of 8.5 milliseconds.

The ES.2 is also available in 500-GB and 750-GB models. The drive line includes a five-year limited warranty.

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