News Seagate introduces 2.5" 15k drives

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/01/17/Seagate_introduces_15k_drives/

 

These look quite uttery amazing. If they are as they promise to be they'll basicly be the best HDD's available. But considering they're fairly big for 2.5's, uber-fast, and no doubt heavily optimised and developed, they're going to cost an absolute fortune. Expect disgusting prices that make hardware RAID cards look cheap.

 

combine this with some form of home/business level NAS and it would be a very good solution for a lot of people's data storage needs i think.

 

Seagate's 10k savvio drives are around 3x £/GB of the 3.5" models, I should expect something similar from the 15k savvio - around £700 for the 73GB model.

Maybe seagate has finally decided that they can't make up their performance deficit with tech and has gone for making it up by quantity.

 

get SATA2 controller instead of SCSI, ill gladly grab a couple

 

We have been installing these SAS 2.5" into HP servers for a while now and the lack of 15k's for database apps has been quite restrictive so this is welcome news.
They will be expensive I am sure but so were 15k 3.5" not so long ago. Now we always get 15K 3.5" as there is very little if any price difference.
Not too long before we are putting these in dektops for sure.

 

I was aware that the SAS and S-ATA connections are similar, and indeed SAS controllers will happily support S-ATA HDDs (albeit in a 'you don't want to do that, dave' fashion). But I wasn't sure about the flip-story; SAS drives working on S-ATA controllers.

Wikipedia's SAS article has the answer:

Still, an amazing feat of engineering if it's what you need.

 

I have been running a RAID 0 system on 2 ATA133 200Gb drives here for a while and so far I am more than a little impressed by the speed boost, I did it mainly just for something different to try and judging by even these results I will be going the route again albeit with SATA or SCSI which makes these drives look kinda tempting if the price is ok.

 

meh we have had an array full of 15k 2.5" drives at work for the last 2months.

they are very nice but unfortunatly cost a fortune, you can nearly get 2 standard 3.5" arrays for the same price.

also being SAS to take full advantage you need decent array controllers which push the price up further.

 

Is the price worth it for the performance, i mean putting it againts two SATA WD 74GB raptors in raid, now obviously the raptors are cheaper, but would these new drives actually make a difference?

Sam

 

i like those. Shame they are so small being 73GB. I want bigger

 

I am betting that flash technology will mature enough and will get cheaper, and these monster RPM hard drives will soon die.

 

These drives are specifically targeted at enterprise level serving. We're talking hundreds of them in an array. For home uses, raptors would likely be faster, or offer the same speed as these drives just aren't optimised for single-user access patterns. For enterprise use, these (or any other 15k unit for that matter) would run circles around raptors, not to mention offering far better scaleability.

 

Anyone know what kind of hit the seek time on the edge of the disk would take?

 

Seagate gives 2.9ms seek times for the drive, figuring a 2ms average rotational latency, this technically gives you an access time 4.9ms. Manufacturers tend to be a bit optimistic of seek times so I would call it just over 5ms.

 

I doubt they'll be quite as high as £700... even data centre managers have budgets. I've just specced up a server with 2.5" SAS drives, although they weren't 15k. The 73Gb drives were only £165 (only...), so I wouldn't expect a £500 premium for a 33% increase in spin speed.

 

£165 is a good price, the cheapest I've seen them at retail for is just over £200 inc VAT.

never the less, you're probably right. £700 is a bit steep. I suppose SAS/SCSI flagships usually retail at closer to £500.

Datacentre managers get better prices though. We just picked up around 1000 146GB 15k units, maybe we got a bulk discount

 

Looks to be interesting, wonder about the noise levels though?? probably not that important in server applications but for those of us with other ideas might be a bit of a sod really.
Jaz_knos

 

The main advantage to this is rack space.
Most co-locations charge on a per-U basis so the smaller you can make your server the cheaper your hosting costs.
You can't easily use 6 raptors in a 1U server, certainly not if you want to be able to hot-swap the drives.
6x 2.5" drives on the other hand is no problem.
So although you spend more on the HDDs initially you'll likely save that on the cost of hosting a smaller server.