At 510 g, the Savvio is not much lighter than a 3.5" hard drive. In contrast to notebook drives, the diminutive Seagate's performance scores less than a conventional enterprise drive of the 3.5" class in only a few disciplines. For example, the maximum data transfer rate at the outer edge of the media is 60 MB/s - somewhat slower than the latest 3.5", 10,000 rpm SCSI drives - but towards the end of the storage area (the inner edge of the disk) it actually overtakes its bigger cousins.

The Savvio's real selling point, however, is its compact size. Thanks to the 2.5" format, we can look forward to new storage systems in 19 inch factor that multiply data density through the use of the pint-sized drives while power consumption sinks at the same time.

It will also quickly pay off in many fields to invest in 2.5" drives for day-to-day server management in business-critical areas. For one thing, because of the 70% reduction in dimensions - according to Seagate - more hot-swap frames can fit in a rack server. For another, it should be possible in theory to find room for more than four hard drives in a one-height system (1 HU or 1U). This in turn would boost the performance of a server storage system - at constant levels of consumption and heat dissipation. Fast 2.5" drives are also very attractive for "blades," as these miniscule servers will be offering the same storage space in sufficient quantity and contemporary performance in the future too.

The Ultra320 version is not ideal in these scenarios, however, as the parallel interface prevents the use of numerous drives in a small space - after all, the supersized data cable and the extremely bulky plug must also be accommodated. While we're on the subject, SAS is without a doubt the more attractive interface - unfortunately Seagate tells us that the corresponding drives will only be available in fall.