Seagate has accelerated its Savvio 2.5-inch drive up to 15,000rpm and doubled its SAS speed, making it the fastest small form factor drive on the market.

The Savvio 15K.2 has a SAS 2.0 interface running at 6Gbit/s and comes in either 73GB or 146GB capacities. It is optionally a self-encrypting drive, using AES encryption, as is the recently announced 10,000rpm Savvio 10K.3. This means data on either drive should be safe from access when the drive is disposed of, or if it is lost or stolen.

Seagate emphasises its power efficiency, saying the drive uses 70 per cent less power than an equivalent 3.5-inch, 15,000rpm drive. Users can also pack more IOPS into a drive shelf compared to the same shelf filled with 3.5-inch drives. IDC expects that 2.5-inch drive shipments will overtake 3.5-inch ones this year because of their better performance in this way and lower power profile.

HP and Dell provided supporting quotes in the Seagate release, so we should expect products from them using the 15K.2 Savvios in short order.

Both the 15K.2 and 10K.3 drives should ship in December, but the self-encrypting versions won't be available until the first quarter next year. ®

Related stories

• Comment WD to sink teeth into enterprise drive market (16 October 2009)
• Faster Barracuda escapes from Seagate (21 September 2009)
• Comment Seagate forced to think about the next small big thing (28 July 2009)
• All aboard for six gig SAS (24 March 2009)
• Small is beautiful for Xyratex arrays (2 March 2009)
• Dot Hill shrinks its RAID offering (20 January 2009)
• Comment So when did the knives come out at Seagate? (16 January 2009)
• Seagate to slash up to 10 per cent of staff (12 January 2009)
• Seagate dishes up 1TB drive, looks ahead to 2TB (6 January 2009)
• Seagate slashes bare drive warranties (12 December 2008)
• Update HP claims market-topping 2.5-inch storage (5 December 2008)
• Fujitsu follows Seagate with svelte 6Gbps SAS drive (17 November 2008)
• Of Dell's self-encrypting laptop (10 November 2008)
• Seagate heading for the wild west (4 November 2008)
• Review WD Caviar Black 1TB vs Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB (28 October 2008)
• Seagate earnings slump 83% (23 October 2008)
• Seagate picks LSI for flash controller (21 October 2008)
• Seagate tries again with external drives (15 September 2008)
• Western Digital's 2.5-inch to hit 1TB by early 2010 (12 September 2008)
• Seagate layoffs coming? (8 September 2008)
• Seagate CEO cops to sloppy floppy in Q4 (16 July 2008)
• Seagate first with 1.5TB hard drives (10 July 2008)