Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 SAS

Until SSDs can safely prove that they're a reliable long-term media for Enterprise storage, the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface owns the market share for server storage. Until Seagate launches their Solid State Drive counterpart, the 600GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 SAS Hard Drive ST3600057SS delivers safe and affordable high-capacity storage to data servers and Enterprise environments. The 4Gb/s FC or 6-Gb/s SAS 2.0 interface allows the perpendicular storage technology to deliver 15,000 RPM data bandwidth for an industry-leading 1.6-million-hour MTBF. In this article, Benchmark Reviews tests the Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 SAS hard drive against a wide variety of storage solutions.

Most computer enthusiasts remember Seagate by their dominance over the performance storage market throughout the 1990's. Seagate Technology later acquired Maxtor Corporation in 2006, allowing them to compete with other brands for the desktop storage segment. Enjoying a near-monopoly over the corporate storage industry, Seagate offers the Constellation, Savvio, Cheetah, Barracuda, and SV35 storage solutions for the Enterprise server platform. The only real contender to their market share comes from IBM and Western Digital, from products like the 10,000 RPM WD VelociRaptor series SATA hard disk drive.

Very recently Seagate introduced the Barracuda XT hard drive, making Seagate is the first company to offer a product for the SATA 6Gb/s (SATA-III) interface. This is good news for hard drives, but it's even better news for SSDs, which have encroached upon the 300 MBps SATA-II throughput barrier for quite some time now. Until Seagate launches their own SSD product line for the Enterprise sector near the end of 2009, we can only speculate that it too will offer SATA 6G compatibility.

Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 drives reduce costs for 3.5-inch Tier 1 solutions, helping to sustain business. They have the highest performance, capacity and reliability of any 3.5-inch mission critical drive. The drive has up to 600 GB of capacity, which reduces storage costs per GB and increases capacity per watt. The Cheetah 15K.7 drive includes Seagate PowerTrim technology, which dynamically optimizes drive power consumption at all levels of activity.

The drive is leveraged from the highly successful Cheetah 15K.6 platform and has the industry's highest reliability rating, reducing drive replacement costs. The drive is available with a SAS or FC interface and is the highest-performing 3.5-inch drive in the world. The drive reduces RAID rebuild times while minimizing reliability risks. The SAS drives will support 6-Gb/s transfer rates as part of the new SAS 2.0 feature set.

SAS 2.0 was developed to provide additional signal and data integrity features to enable SAS to be ideally suited for use in high-end network storage applications. The Cheetah 15K.7 drive is the second generation of Cheetah drives available with a Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) option, (which requires TCG-compliant host or controller support) providing government-grade data security and instant secure erase for drives reused, recycled or returned for expired lease, repair or warranty.

About Seagate Technology LLC.

Seagate is the worldwide leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of hard disk drives and storage solutions, providing products for a wide-range of applications, including Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile Computing, Consumer Electronics and Branded Solutions. Seagate's business model leverages technology leadership and world-class manufacturing to deliver industry-leading innovation and quality to its global customers, with the goal of being the time-to-market leader in all markets in which it participates. The company is committed to providing award-winning products, customer support and reliability to meet the world's growing demand for information storage. Seagate can be found around the globe and at http://www.seagate.com/.

Previous Page - Next Page >>