New Seagate Cheetah Drives Go High-Capacity, High-Performance

Seagate Monday started shipping a new line of Cheetah high-capacity, high-performance hard drives with encryption capability to its distribution and retail channels.

The company's new Cheetah 15K.7 enterprise hard drives come in a 3.5-inch form factor with either 6-Gbps SAS or 4-Gbps Fibre Channel controller and a capacity of up to 600 GB.

The new drives are available in 10,000-rpm and 15,000-rpm versions with capacities of 300 GB, 450 GB or 600 GB, said Teresa Worth, senior product marketing manager for Seagate's Enterprise Business unit.

"We are the first to market with a 15,000-rpm drive with 600-Gbyte capacity and with 6-Gbit SAS," Worth said.

The new drives also include the first hard-drive-based encryption feature in the channel, Worth said. Earlier releases of self-encrypting hard drives were shipped specifically to Seagate's OEM customers, she said.

That self-encryption capability allows solution providers and system builders to sell servers with the ability to prevent someone from grabbing data from a stolen server, Worth said. "If someone breaks into a company and steals a server, the loss of the data could ruin a small business," she said.

The capability also allows data to be easily erased so that a drive can be reused or sold via channels such as eBay without worrying about the data on the drives being stolen, Worth said.

However, the self-encrypting option requires a Trusted Computing Group-compliant host or controller. The Trusted Computing Group approved the encryption standard earlier this year, and host-based controllers are expected to be available later this month, Worth said. As a result, the self-encryption option for the new Seagate drives will be available in September, she said.

The security of data on the new Seagate Cheetah hard drives comes via a single ASIC which handles the encryption and decryption with no impact on performance, Worth said.

More details about the self-encryption capabilities will be available in August, she said.

The new drives will be available through Bell Microproducts, Avnet, D&H Distributing, Computech International, Ingram Micro and SED in the U.S., and through Bell Microproducts, Synnex, Supercom and Tech Data in Canada.

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