Seagate ships new generation of 15K RPM Cheetah drive

Scotts Valley (CA) - Seagate has begun shipping its Cheetah 15K.4 drive as mainstream harddisk for IT professionals who are looking for reliable and fast I/O transactions from enterprise systems.

The new Cheetah 15K.4 drive joins the 10K-RPM Cheetah 10K.7, which began shipping last month. According to Seagate, both disc drives enable a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for enterprise applications, from e-mail and business processing, to OLTP and decision support.

The Cheetah 15K.4 delivers 30 percent more I/O’s-per-second and 20 percent faster response times than 3.5" 10K-RPM drives, the company claims. As a result, the 15K.4 would enable higher performance while using fewer drives. The new drive is available with Ultra320 SCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces today.

A Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) will be offered the first quarter of next year. SAS is expected to become the successor of parallel SCSI and provide a transfer speed of 3.0 Gbit per second.

Reliability of the drive is rated at a Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) of 1.4 million hours.

The Cheetah 15K.4 can be purchased in capacities of 36, 73, and 147 GByte, priced at $329, $659 and $1315, respectively.