Seagate Unveils Plans for 2.5" Enterprise Disc Drives

Seagate announced a new 2.5" enterprise disc drive platform. Systems built around these small enterprise-class disc drives will provide data centers with unparalleled levels of IOPS (input/outputs per second) performance in a smaller system space compared to what's being delivered today. For example, a 2U rack storage array with 2.5" drives will be able to outperform today's common 3U rack storage arrays by nearly 140% on an IOPS-per-U basis while providing equal or greater storage capacity.

The enterprise-class 2.5" disc drive platform is a result of extensive research into end-user IT challenges and close collaboration with other technology leaders like HP, Intel and Microsoft, and is targeted directly at server and storage consolidation needs. The 2.5" enterprise disc drive platform will enable a new era of rack server and storage arrays and blade servers including: 1U rack RAID 5 enterprise servers, storage dense 2U rack storage arrays, and new blade servers capable of new levels of IOPS performance with the highest reliability. The enterprise 2.5" disc drive platform will be produced for the current versions of Fibre Channel and SCSI, as well as Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), the latest evolution of SCSI that promises greatly improved performance, reliability and availability, as well as scalability for the growing needs of the enterprise.

Seagate intends to deliver its first enterprise-class solutions based on the 2.5" disc drive platform in 2004.

For more information about Seagate's 2.5" disc drive platform, visit the Technology section on Seagate's web site.