Introduction

It has been quite a busy month with next generation SATA and SAS 6Gb/s hitting the market. A couple of months ago we received out first SAS 2.0 hard drives from Seagate and tested them on first generation hardware, but we noticed that the two fastest drives that arrived, the Cheetah 15K.7 and Savvio 15K.2 were limited by the first generation SAS controller we had on hand to test with. A couple of weeks ago LSI and Intel both announced their first SAS 2.0 6 Gb/s storage controllers and we were able to finally get the most out of the Seagate second generation SAS drives.

So far we have reviewed the Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 and the Savvio 15K.2 and found that the performance of both drives far exceeds anything we have in the consumer market outside of solid state drives. Their 15,000 RPM platters make access times lower and now we are about to test the 10,000 RPM enterprise Savvio from Seagate, the 10K.3.

Seagate's Savvio Series products use the 2.5-inch wide, 12.5mm tall form factor that is quickly becoming the standard for enterprise servers. This new 2.5-inch form factor allows for more drives to be used in the same amount of space than traditional 3.5-inch drives. In a 1U, 1.75 inch rack mount server you can fit four 3.5-inch drives, but in that same space eight 2.5-inch drives. In the enterprise market the number of drives outshines the capacity; more drives will equal more transfer speed and higher RAID array reliability when used with more advanced RAID levels.

Let's have a look and see the specifications of this third generation 10,000 RPM Savvio from Seagate.