Seagate's New 15,000 RPM, 600 GB Monster

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3:30 PM - July 13, 2009 by Tuan Nguyen

Seagate today unveiled what could be the fastest hard drive on the planet: the Cheetah 15K.7.

Long accepted as the fastest enterprise hard drive on Earth, the Seagate Cheetah drives had one major drawback: capacity. But now, Seagate has upped the ante with the new 15K.7 Cheetah by delivering a whopping 600 GB capacity. While it's nowhere near the 1.5 TB drives that are out there, it's a huge plus considering that the previous Cheetah had less than 1/3 of the new drive's capacity. Did we also mention that the drive's platters spins at a blistering rate of 15,000 rotations per minute?

The new Cheetah 15K.7 drives will ship with 6 Gb/sec. serial attached SCSI (SAS) and 4 Gb/sec. fiber-channel (FC) interfaces.

Worried about durability? Seagate claims that the new Cheetah 15K.7 can run at 15,000 RPMs for up 1.6 million hours. To put 1.6 million hours into perspective, that's:

- 66,667 days
- 182.6 years
- 1.826 centuries

While solid state drives (SSDs) get most of the publicity these days, HDDs are still going strong. We're still nowhere near to hitting the limits of magnetic storage, and HDDs will continue to offer the best solution for capacity hungry consumers for years to come.

Source : Tom's Hardware US

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dingumf 07/13/2009 9:39 PM
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-14+

The question is how much?

Also, I guess this sure beats those Velociraptor HDDs I've seen.

xc0mmiex 07/13/2009 9:40 PM
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-0+

how much?

hellscook 07/13/2009 9:45 PM
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-20+

Try running a hard drive for 1.6 million hours. Just try. It'll be bad in 5 years or so.

mcnuggetofdeath 07/13/2009 9:47 PM
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-1+

Where, when, and for how much can I pick this up. Ill buy myself a freakin' controller card so i can run this in my gaming rig. Also transfer rates plz.

audioee 07/13/2009 9:49 PM
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-13+

Sweeeeeet...

But, how fast will it load Crysis? JK!!!

(I just had to) You know some one else would have asked.

jacobdrj 07/13/2009 9:50 PM
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Anonymous 07/13/2009 9:51 PM
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-12+

The question is: Why not a SATA version?
I know it's a stupid question but I would like to see one of these on my home computer one day.... (But for sure I will not spent on a SAS controller...)

alvine 07/13/2009 10:03 PM
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Anonymous 07/13/2009 10:05 PM
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--2+

how loud?

derek2006 07/13/2009 10:13 PM
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-1+

Are you sure the it's not the MTBF that is 1.6million hours?

hovaucf 07/13/2009 10:17 PM
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-2+

Of course these drives are faster than Velociraptors, its a 15K SAS drive compared to a 10K SATA drive.

Plus this drive launch price will most likely be approaching $900 US.

You can still get a current gen raid card to run these drives as no one is going to buy enough of these to top the max throughput of 2100 MB/s for current 3Gb raid cards, for home use.

thegreatgathby 07/13/2009 10:20 PM
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-0+

the new sata is 6gb though, I don't see why they would not include it as an option...

fonzy 07/13/2009 10:24 PM
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-0+

"$900?" might as well just buy an SSD for that much.

kezix_69 07/13/2009 10:24 PM
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-0+

According to this site: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/show [...] =HD-222-SE it is selling for £478.25 ex VAT which is $773.66 US dollars.

Basically, not cheap.

mlcloud 07/13/2009 10:28 PM
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--2+

How loud are they? Will it go WHIIRRR WHIIRRR WHIIRRR, or must I purchase an SSD?

I understand what this article was trying to do, but let's not paint hard drives in too glorious a light...

and... price? xD.

B-Unit 07/13/2009 10:32 PM
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-7+

Its called a server hard drive fellas. Your not gonna get a SATA connector.

If Seagate decides that WD is gettin too much love for the V-raptor, they might make a desktop version, but I wouldn't hold your breath.

hovaucf 07/13/2009 10:39 PM
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-2+

SATA III is being released more so because SSD are already approaching SATA II limitations, you can take a Velociraptor and it still wont sustain speeds above SATA I which is ~150 MB/s. But all SAS drives are loud and they run really hot w/o excellent cooling.

Kezix_69 that link you provided is not a 15K.7 Cheetah as they havent even been released yet, thats a NS drive which stands for "Nearline SAS"

The 15K.7 model # is ST3600957SS

maigo 07/13/2009 10:43 PM
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-5+

how do you test a batch of drives and get 182.6 years as an average?

Strandwolf 07/13/2009 10:51 PM
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-0+

I got excited about it when the big press release was made back in early January. No sign of them until now. I called Seagate about a month ago and was told they'd be out in July. There are two smaller capacity versions as well, according to the January articles.

Anonymous 07/13/2009 10:57 PM
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"how do you test a batch of drives and get 182.6 years as an average?"

Where we're going, we don't need MTBF tests

gwolfman 07/13/2009 10:58 PM
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mcnuggetofdeath :
Where, when, and for how much can I pick this up. Ill buy myself a freakin' controller card so i can run this in my gaming rig. Also transfer rates plz.


Too loud!

cdillon 07/13/2009 10:59 PM
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-6+

You will never see SATA on an enterprise HD because the SATA command-set lacks several enterprise data-integrity features. And those features will never be added to SATA in the future because then SATA would essentially become SAS, and if you wanted that then why not just use SAS in the first place?

kanaric 07/13/2009 11:09 PM
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Quote :how loud?

i own a 300 gb, no louder than a 7200

if you buy ~$300 i7 board you get a decent SAS chipset in there

At $700 i would just buy 2 300gb for 600 GB and raid 0. The 15.6 300gb is about $300 if you look around.

D_Kuhn 07/13/2009 11:12 PM
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I use Cheetah's on two of my systems (36x5 raid5 and 72x2 raid1)... they're no louder than any other drive (basically not noticeable compared to the system fans). Performance wise they were impossible to beat until SSD's really started flying.

kal326 07/13/2009 11:30 PM
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B-Unit :
Its called a server hard drive fellas. Your not gonna get a SATA connector.If Seagate decides that WD is gettin too much love for the V-raptor, they might make a desktop version, but I wouldn't hold your breath.



No joke, people are asking about the price, how loud, and the really important one...how much heat. I ran 4 15k 18GB drives in a workstation once because I found them and a controller cheap. I was using it as a regular desktop machine, put off way to much heat and noise to be kept in my apt bedroom. That and the red lights on the raid card made sweet night rider scrolling effects on the wall because the case side was off. I thought it was awesome, kept my girlfriend at the time up at night.

Anonymous 07/13/2009 11:30 PM
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You will never see a SATA one because it will be around $1000 and still not be as fast as an SSD, therefore it wouldn't have any mass market appeal. Its only for robust business class servers with oodles of money to blow on hardware.

IzzyCraft 07/13/2009 11:37 PM
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--3+

just need cost! Also how loud is it WD fast drive is well mounted is very quiet in fact usually more so then normal drives i hate to actually hear my hdd winding up.

H8ff0000 07/13/2009 11:48 PM
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audioee :
Sweeeeeet...But, how fast will it load Crysis? JK!!! (I just had to) You know some one else would have asked.



No, you didn't have to. Neither does anyone else. It's old, unoriginal, and forces people who want to participate in intelligent discussion on topics such as this one to sift through the filler. I'm not trying to flame you, only encourage the movement away from the constant Crysis references... awww what the hell... In Soviet Russia, Crysis can't play you! :)

kamel5547 07/14/2009 12:13 PM
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hellscook :
Try running a hard drive for 1.6 million hours. Just try. It'll be bad in 5 years or so.



Um... the server drives actually do usually perform as advertised. Actually they usually outlast the useful life of the machine and their capacity. HDD failures are not as bad as it may seem, perhaps a 10% rate on standard drives (per year). In the 5 years I've had the current servers (28 drives), I had one go bad.

ProDigit80 07/14/2009 12:27 PM
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-2+

Instead of making the drive spin faster, why not install a second or third arm? That would make more sense to me, and boost the speed of diskdrives dramatically too!

bk420 07/14/2009 1:01 AM
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hellscook :
Try running a hard drive for 1.6 million hours. Just try. It'll be bad in 5 years or so.



This is for servers and usually come with a 5 year warranty.


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