Introduction

At first blush, the Seagate Savvio ST973401LC's form factor stands out as an undersized hard drive with an UltraSCSI interface. However, it won't stay like that for long, because Seagate is planning to launch versions for SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) and Fibre Channel in the near future too. In addition to their slim dimensions, the new drives are billed as being far better than the old 3.5" models. We set out to learn more.

The new Savvio series offers everything that a fast drive needs: 10,000 rpm - a novelty for 2.5 inch drives - 8 MB buffer memory and search times quoted at a mere 4.1 ms.

With the Savvio models, Seagate promises generally fast data access and high I/O performance. Although 3.5" drives are typically faster as far as the latter goes, their minimal space requirements mean that more of the drives can populate rack servers in the smallest space, so that I/O performance will at the least average out to the same value. Capacities of 36.7 and 73.4 GB are available, with one or two platters.