Seagate Cheetah 15K.5

Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 Available Capacities Model Number Capacity ST373455xx 73 GB ST3146855xx 147 GB ST3300655xx 300 GB Lowest Real-Time Price (300 GB): Introduction With the introduction of the Cheetah 10K.7 nearly two years ago, industry-leader Seagate Technology signaled that it believed the future of storage belongs to units featuring a 2.5" form-factor rather than the traditional 3.5" chassis that has dominated the industry for well over a decade. As a result, the firm has designated the 2.5" Savvio as the heir-apparent to the 10K Cheetah; the 10K.7 is the last of its kind. Leaving aside the pace at which this transition is taking place, the Cheetah 10K's end has left the Cheetah 15K as the workhorse of Seagate's enterprise drive line and as a result has thrust the 15K into the limelight when it comes to the implementation of the newest capacities and technologies. Two years after the introduction of the 147-gigabyte Cheetah 15K.4, Seagate is again the first to take capacities to the next level with the 300-gigabyte Cheetah 15K.5.

The 15K.5 achieves its watershed capacity through the incorporation of perpendicular recording. Simply put, by turning the bits "vertical" as opposed to "horizontal" (or parallel) when contrasted with the plane represented by a drive's platter, a significantly higher number of bits can be stored per platter track than with traditional methods. Over the past two years, perpendicular recording has made considerable waves in the media's coverage of the industry. In truth, however, the theory behind the technology has been around for some time... it is just that other, more conservative methods to effect density increases have provided a path of least resistance. These other avenues have been exhausted, however, and the time to encode data vertically has arrived. It should come as little surprise to most that Seagate was first out the door.

While the technique debuted in other lines such as the Momentus (5400.3) and Barracuda (7200.10), nothing underscores the maturity of the technology than its use in the Cheetah family. Through vertical recording, the 15K.5 squeezes a massive 75 gigabytes of data onto each of its four diminutive 2.6" platters. Seagate specs seek time at 3.5 milliseconds and equips the drive with a standard 16 MB buffer. A five-year warranty backs the drive. The drive will initially be available in Ultra320 and Fibre Channel interfaces with SAS to follow.

When testing the previous generation of Seagate's SCSI drives (Savvio 10K.1, Cheetah 10K.7, and Cheetah 15K.5), StorageReview uncovered significant performance differences when these drives were set to different predefined cache segmentation strategies through Seagate's Seatools Enterprise utility. The Cheetah 15K.5, however, returns the same scores regardless of whether the utility's "Performance Mode" setting is toggled on or off. In the tests that follow, however, the older Cheetah 15K.4's scores are represented by scores when the drive's PM setting is "off" (in other words, server mode).

As an enterprise-class 15,000 RPM drive, the Cheetah 15K.5 will be compared to these drives in the tests that follow: