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.
