To meet the growing demand for higher-capacity, more efficient enterprise storage systems, Seagate today introduced the Savvio 10K.3 hard drive - the world's highest-capacity, small form factor 2.5-inch enterprise hard drive built for the demands of enterprise servers and storage arrays. This latest generation of 2.5-inch drive offers 70% lower power and greater than 60% performance density over traditional 3.5-inch drives.

As the only 10K-rpm 2.5-inch enterprise design backed by two prior generations of field-proven reliability, the Savvio 10K.3 drive leads the industry with 300GB of capacity, reliability of 1.6 million hours MTBF, and an advanced SAS 2.0 (6Gb/sec data rate) interface. Seagate's Savvio 10K.3 drive is also the industry's first 2.5-inch self-encrypting enterprise drive with government-grade Full Disk Encryption (FDE) data protection.

"The combination of higher capacity and 6Gb SAS on an enterprise-class small form factor disk drive, like the Savvio 10K.3 drive, continues to entice the industry to move from 3.5-inch to 2.5-inch based solutions for use in enterprise storage systems and arrays," said Dave Reinsel, vice president of Storage Research at IDC. "IDC predicts that shipments of small form factor enterprise drives into enterprise solutions will outnumber 3.5-inch enterprise drive shipments by 2010."

Seagate's Savvio 10K.3 drive was built to accommodate a wide range of mainstream enterprise storage applications, where both high capacity and low power consumption are critical requirements within an IT organization.

"Seagate was the pioneer of the 2.5-inch form factor enterprise standard, stemming from work with customers to better understand data center requirements, including the need for greater storage performance density, while continuing to focus on reducing power consumption and cooling costs," said Sherman Black, senior vice president and general manager, Seagate Enterprise Compute Business. "The Savvio 10K and 15K families have evolved into becoming the most widely-adopted 2.5-inch enterprise drive families throughout the enterprise. Now, with the introduction of the 300GB Savvio 10K.3 drive, more versatile storage systems can be built based upon this sweet-spot capacity."

Major OEM evaluations of the Savvio 10K.3 drive have begun. General product availability is planned for the second half of calendar year 2008.

Savvio 10K.3 Product Details
Seagate's Savvio 10K.3 drive offers tremendous improvements over 3.5-inch 300GB 15K-rpm drives including a 70% power savings. Savvio 10K.3 performance is even greater at a system level, delivering a 60% improvement in IOPS density, while also providing at least twice the capacity. These 2.5-inch drive advantages in total translate into greater overall value and reduced total cost of ownership to IT organizations and administrators eager to optimize their data center's power and performance efficiency.

The Savvio 10K.3 is also the world's first drive to operate at 6Gb/sec transfer rates, which is part of the new SAS 2.0 feature set. SAS 2.0 was developed to provide additional signal and data integrity features to enable SAS to be ideally-suited for use in high-end network storage applications.

Delivering on Seagate's commitment to add security features throughout its product portfolio, Savvio 10K.3 will be offered with self-encrypting FDE technology. As the industry's first 2.5-inch self-encrypting drive, the Savvio 10K.3 provides data-at-rest protection for its entire life cycle.

Seagate Helps Data Centers Focus on Going Green with PowerTrim Technology
Seagate's next-generation PowerTrim technology is integrated into the Savvio 10K.3 drive and manages drive power consumption during idle activity. With PowerTrim technology, the Savvio 10K.3 addresses the IT dilemma facing energy-constrained data centers by delivering best-in-class power savings.