Seagate Cheetah 15K.4, ST373454SS (73 GB, SAS)

Cheetah is a synonym for high-performance hard drives as it was used for Seagate's first 10,000 RPM hard drives. Today, there are Cheetah 15K and 10K drives. The 10K versions offer capacities of up to 300 GB and the 15K models are geared for high-performance environments. The latest 15K.5 (see later) even offers 300 GB at 15,000 RPM.

The Cheetah 15K.4 still is Seagate's mainstream 15,000 RPM model. All versions are equipped with 8 MB buffer and they're rated with 3.5 ms average read and 4.0 ms average write seek time.

The idle power requirements vary between 14.37 W and 10.4 W within the drive family, but the 73 GB version requires 11.95 W. Seagate is the only drive manufacturer to provide a typical operating power requirement, which is rated at 17 W for this particular drive model.