New Enterprise Hard Drives: 6 Gb/s SAS And 200 MB/s

2.5” Seagate Savvio 10K.3 (10,000 RPM, 300GB)

The Savvio 10K.3 is already Seagate’s third-generation 2.5” SAS drive, while Fujitsu and Hitachi have younger product lines. However, this doesn’t translate into a general advantage for Seagate. The 10K.3 delivered a 7.1 ms access time, which Hitachi’s C10K300 and the Fujitsu MDB2300RC matched.

Seagate’s Savvio 10K.3 reached up to 133 MB/s read throughput. Hitachi was a bit faster, Fujitsu a bit slower. Seagate dominated file and Web server benchmarks; Hitachi won in the database and workstation tests. However, both the Fujitsu MDB2300RC and the Hitachi C10K300 were superior in the application-heavy PCMark Vantage benchmark. This particular test is more suitable for desktop environments, but it reflects what happens when you utilize these drives in workstation PCs. Finally, Seagate beat Hitachi’s idle power, but it had to surrender to the very efficient 10,000 RPM Fujitsu drive. Yet, the Seagate Savvio 10K.3 had the lowest power at delivering a defined stream of data, such as HD video playback (4.4W versys 4.9W for Hitachi and 5.0W for Fujitsu).

In the end, performance per watt for streaming reads and workstation I/O was average or slightly above average. This isn’t exciting, but it’s still acceptable considering that the Seagate drive has been around longer. All 10K.3 Savvios utilize SAS 2.0 at 6 Gb/s, and you can choose between 300GB and 146GB options.

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Throughput Diagram

The Savvio 10K.3 is Seagate’s first SAS 6 Gb/s 2.5” enterprise hard drive. Its 130+ MB/s throughput is great, but not best of class anymore. However, performance and efficiency are solid.