Seagate to Shrink Drives

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Storage World Conference -- Seagate Technology Inc. (NYSE: STX) is developing 2.5-inch form-factor, 10,000-RPM drives that the company says will let enterprise users pack 70 percent more storage into the same amount of space required by today's larger, 3.5-inch drives.

The new unit, which Seagate generically (and prosaically) refers to as its Small Form Factor (SFF) drive, will be 2.5 inches long, 15 millimeters high, and 70 millimeters wide. Seagate expects to start shipping the SFF drives to OEMs in early 2004.

"We have not changed the form factor of enterprise drives for the past decade," says Gary Gentry, VP of strategic marketing and planning. "It's time for a change."

The SFF drive will support SCSI, Fibre Channel, and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interfaces, and it will hold either one or two platters. It will actually use the same 65mm platters that Seagate uses in its current 10K and 15K 3.5-inch Cheetah drives -- the new form factor simply shrinks the "can" around them. Gentry says Seagate hasn't decided what it's going to name the family of smaller drives. (May we suggest "Chee-to"?)

The SFF drives, according to Seagate, will allow storage systems vendors to offer the same performance in about 70 percent less rack space. Six SFF drives will be able to fit in a 1U form factor, Seagate says, meaning a 1U system can support RAID 5. The SFF drives will also consume about 40 percent less power and generate less heat than current 3.5-inch units.Seagate, whose customers include EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), is interested in promoting the Small Form Factor as an industry standard for enterprise-class drives. Gentry notes that the 2.5-inch form factor is already an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard.

"Nothing gets big in this industry without a second source," Gentry says.

The 2.5-inch drives will operate at 10,000 RPM because the smaller size won't handle 15K speeds, Seagate says. "You can't spin something that small and thin at 15K," Gentry says. "You have to manage things like air flow and turbulence."

But Randy Kerns, senior analyst at Evaluator Group, says the Seagate SFF drive isn't really a huge deal. "It's a natural progression of disk technology," he says.

The larger problem that the industry needs to solve, he says, is "access density": The fact that the performance of enterprise drives has been steadily declining in relation to their capacity. In other words, the number of I/O operations per second (IOPS) per Gbyte has been on a downward trajectory in recent years. "It's the electromechanical problem of rotating media," he says. "The disks can't spin fast enough."Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch