Seagate Savvio 10k.2: 10,000 RPM

The Savvio 10k.2 is Seagate's second generation 2.5" SAS hard drive. The first generation of Savvio hard drives was launched as early as 2004; at that time the drives were still equipped with an Ultra320 SCSI interface. SAS or Serial Attached SCSI followed almost one year later.

The Savvio 10k.2 is already considerably faster than the initial Savvio family, which doesn't have much to do with the interface, but with recording technology and other improvements. We last used the Savvio 10k.2 when we compared multi-channel Unified Serial (SAS/SATA) RAID controllers. It delivers more than 90 MB/s and up to 174 MB/s at the interface, combined with an average access time of 7.6 ms. The average seek time is specified at 3.8 ms reading and 4.4 ms for writes. These are excellent results, as only very few desktop hard drives can beat the transfer rate and the access time is only beaten by drives that rotate faster or aren't based on mechanical media. The Savvio gets hot when under load, but it doesn't require dedicated cooling when installed into proper drive bays. The system and standard drive ventilation should suffice under controlled environmental conditions.

While 3.5" hard drives typically require 7-10 W when being idle, the Savvio 10k.2's 5 Watts are a really good result. Seagate offers two models, one at 146 GB and a second one at 73 GB, running on only one platter. Both have 16 MB cache and a five-year warranty.