3.5”: Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 (15,000 RPM, 300GB)

Finally, the Cheetah 15K.7 is currently the fastest hard drive when it comes to throughput. A 203 MB/s read maximum is quite impressive; no competitor comes even close. Similarly, the 15K.7 stands alone on minimum read throughput at 122 MB/s. Write performance results echo these numbers. 

Although flash SSDs do reach faster throughput, you should be careful with those alternatives. They may not always be able to maintain their promised throughput while hard drives in a controlled environment typically do. The only exception are I/O-heavy applications, in which hard drives don’t stand a chance (not even with the 15K.7’s 5.7 ms access time and I/O results, which that are only slightly behind the Savvio 15K.2 and Fujitsu’s MBE2147RC).

The downside to all of this screaming performance is power consumption. The drive’s 13.5W idle power may be less than previous Cheetah 15K generations, but we still saw power numbers reach up to 16.2W. As a result, this Seagate’s efficiency results are not very impressive. Large, high-performance 3.5” drives still justify their designs with high throughput, but we believe that this Cheetah 15K will be the last of its kind. The advantages of the 2.5” form factor are just too obvious.

Throughput Diagram

Very impressive. This drive nails more than 200 MB/s.