Seagate announced a new range of 10,000rpm hard discs, called Savvio, at the Intel Developers' Forum (IDF) yesterday.

The new range is based on a 2.5 inch form factor. The drives have a 40 per cent lower power requirement than their 3.5 inch counterparts, a 15 per cent faster seek time, and three interface options - Fibre Channel, Ultra320 SCSI and SAS.

Aimed squarely at the cost-conscious enterprise, the drives are available in a one or two platter design at 36GB and 73GB capacities.

The range has also been given a reliability specification of1.4 million hours MTBF, based on testing in a 7/24/365 100 per cent duty cycle enterprise-class workload rather than desktop environment.

Seagate says that these features make the range ideal for high I/O density hardware platforms, including new servers, storage arrays and blade servers.

General availability for Savvio will be at the end of the second calendar quarter of 2004. Savvio with SAS is scheduled for late Q3 2004. More info here. ®