LSI's 36 GB 15,000 RPM Disk Drive

LSI's new 36 gigabyte 15,000 RPM disk drive for its MetaStor E-Series family of storage systems may not be very big but it certainly sounds fast. The company says the drive enables up to 40 percent more input/output operations per second (IOPs) than comparable 10,000 RPM drives of the same capacity, depending on application and configuration. The speedy drives are now available in 18 gigabyte or 36 gigabyte sizes if you happen to use a MetaStor E-Series storage system. LSI thinks the new drives will be of particular interest to companies that interact with their customers via revenue-generating, transaction-based applications over the web, letting them achieve higher performance from the same number of spindles or reduce the total number of drives in their systems. MetaStor storage systems support both low profile and half-height drives and can scale from 36 gigabytes to 160 teraBytes of online data storage, along with two gigabit Fibre Channel connectivity. The systems support AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, NetWare, Solaris, Windows NT, and Windows 2000.