Seagate opens fastest, largest drives to channel

Seagate has released its fastest, largest 3.5 inch hard drives to the channel and OEMs will be bringing them to market in the next few months.

The new 15K.7 Cheetah drives available in capacities of up to 600GB and rotate at 15,000RPM, making them the fastest and largest the company has yet produced. They are shipping with 6 Gb/sec. serial attached SCSI (SAS) and 4 Gb/sec. fibre-channel interfaces.

The drives also come with an automatic self-encryption option that writes all data onto the drive in an encrypted format for data security.

“In large data centres a lot of customers don’t return drives for warranty repair because of data security. This allows them to do this,” Teresa Worth, senior product marketing manager at Seagate, told v3.co.uk.

“From channel perspective sellers can use warranty repair but this also allows then to erase drive and reuse it. They can also recoup costs on eBay.”

Given their mission-critical purpose the drives have been built to last, with an estimated average fail tome of 1.6 million hours, or over 182 years.

The drives have also been designed to be as power efficient as possible using Seagate’s Powertrim technology. This optimises the drive’s performance as needed and shuts down sections of the control board where possible.

Worth said that while the industry as a whole was moving towards the 2.5 inch form factor for drives the recession had slowed this as people tried to make do with the systems they had.