The 15,000 RPM Seagate Savvio 15k.1 has been available since early 2007, and it can be considered a logical addition to the Savvio 10k family, which runs at the common 10,000 RPM. Seagate has a lot of experience with 15,000 RPM drives, which certainly was helpful when developing a small-form-factor 15k drive.

This second Savvio drive is also based on a SAS/300 interface and it has 16 MB cache. Seagate states a ready seek time of only 2.9 ms and write seek times of 3.3 ms, which resulted in an average read access time of 5.6 ms in our benchmarks. At up to 104 MB/s, this is one of the fastest available hard drives and it's nice to watch that the minimum transfer rates never fall below 68 MB/s. Finally, this drive's I/O performance is even more impressive, as this discipline is highly important for many types of enterprise-class servers (think of online transaction databases). Our benchmark section has all the results.

Again, there are two models, the 73 GB top version and a 36 GB basic model. Both benefit from Seagate's five-year factory warranty. It's also interesting to know that Seagate claims that the Savvio 15k.1 is the most-reliable hard drive on the market. Though it is virtually impossible to verify such a statement, it is still something to think about.