Seagate Focuses On Reliability With New 2.5-inch, 10K Drives

Storage vendor Seagate on Tuesday said it has started shipping high-capacity 2.5-inch hard drives that are the first to feature 2 million hours mean time between failure reliability.

Seagate's new Savvio 10K.4 hard drives are available in 600GB and 450GB capacity points, which is twice the capacity of Seagate's previous 10,000-rpm hard drives. It is also twice the capacity of similar drives from competing vendors, said Teresa Worth, senior product marketing manager for the company.

The drives are also among the world's most reliable hard drives in the world, and are rated for 2 million hours mean time between failure (MTBF), Worth said. That represents a 25-percent increase in reliability over the company's previous models, she said.

That 2 million hours MTBF figure is estimated based on Seagate's historical reliability over four generations of 2.5-inch hard drives, Worth said.

"We feel this number is achievable based on our field expertise," she said.

However, despite the increase in MTBF, Worth said Seagate is offering the five-year warranty currently included with the company's enterprise hard drives. "After five years, we feel customers should still rotate in new hard drives," she said.

The new Savvio 10K.4 hard drives also include other features which increase reliability, including a new head ramp load-unload feature, enterprise-class rotational vibration management technology, and an optional technology for detecting corrupted data as it moves to and from the drive.

The new drives also feature power management technology that cuts power use by about 60 percent compared to 15,000-rpm, 3.5-inch hard drives, she said.

The Savvio 10K.4 drives target the mainstream market for enterprise storage arrays, Worth said. "That's about one-third of the hard drive market," she said.

The new drives are scheduled to ship this week, and can be ordered in either 6-Gbps SAS or 4-Gbps Fibre Channel interfaces. Solution providers can get the drives through such distributors as Avnet, Bell Micro, D&H, Computech International (CTI), Ingram Micro, SED, and Synnex.

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