We Have a Winner - Seagate's 'Cheetah X15'

Benchmarks - Data Transfer Speed

As I mentioned before, the Cheetah X15 is obviously unable to reach the high maximum transfer speeds of the two other drives, even though the latter only run at 10,000 rpm. If you've read the entire article, you will know that this is due to the data density, which, because of the drive's high rpm, is much lower than the Fujitsu and the Quantum drives.

However, the minimum transfer speed of the Cheetah is where you can really see the advantage in having an amazing 15,000 rpm. While the two 10,000 rpm drives cannot sustain their high data rates and inevitably drop to 23 and 20.5 MB/s, the Cheetah X15 never falls below 30 MB/s. This result, in my opinion, is much more impressive than a high maximum transfer speed.

Data Transfer Diagram