Seagate Technology announced it will begin shipping its new Cheetah 15K.6 hard drive this month. Designed for the world's most demanding enterprise storage environments, the Cheetah 15K.6 drive is Seagate's highest-performance hard drive ever in a 3.5-inch form factor, with a 28% increase in sustained data transfer rates compared to previous generations. With this new performance on tap, the Cheetah 15K.6 drive remarkably consumes significantly less power, using up to 61% less energy in both idle and operational modes.Major OEM system builders, including HP, are working to design in the new Cheetah series hard drive, equipped with its leading Fibre Channel interface for HP's SAN storage systems. "HP's Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), incorporating Seagate's latest Cheetah 15K.6 drive will fulfill the needs of our most demanding customers running mission-critical business applications," said Kyle Fitze, director of Storage Works SAN Marketing, at HP. "The improvements in performance, reliability, power savings, and capacity will collectively help enable our own EVA systems to deliver greater overall value to our customers."

The Cheetah 15K.6 drive also ships in Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), which has become the mainstream enterprise interface of choice for companies including Super Micro Computer. "Many of our customers require top-of-the-line performance and system efficiency," said Charles Liang, CEO and president of Supermicro. "Integrating Seagate's Cheetah 15K.6 drive into our 85%+ high-efficiency, earth-friendly SuperServers and Server Building Block Solutions delivers not only superior performance, but also power savings, scalability and significantly reduced TCO."