Seagate today announced two new members of its award-winning Cheetah enterprise-class hard drive family: the Cheetah 15K.7 hard drive and the Cheetah NS.2 hard drive. Current economic challenges have put even more focus on reducing spending to ensure long-term business sustainability. For businesses that have an existing investment based on a standard 3.5-inch enterprise infrastructure, the new Cheetah drives bolster sustainability through easy drive/system integration, and provide improved levels of system performance, capacity, reliability, and lower power consumption.In support of sustaining the environment, where reduce, reuse and recycle are keys to this best practice, Cheetah drives reduce power consumption, drive replacement costs, and costs per GB. Built for 3.5-inch Tier 1 storage applications, the Cheetah 15K.7 drive and the Cheetah NS.2 drive are the largest capacity mission-critical drives offered at 600GB, and have the highest reliability in the industry. The Cheetah 15K.7 drive delivers the highest performance of any 3.5-inch drive, while the Cheetah NS.2 drive takes power-savings to the furthest extreme by featuring the lowest power requirement of any 3.5-inch Tier 1 drive.

Both drives feature 2 nd-generation PowerTrim technology, which dynamically optimizes drive power consumption at all levels of activity. Using PowerTrim technology, the Cheetah NS.2 drive provides power savings of over 20% when compared to its prior generation design.

"Seagate recognizes IT budgets are constrained, and these new 3.5-inch Cheetah drives are aimed directly at helping enable many businesses sensibly grow and scale as their information needs continue, while at the same time providing the reliability required to avoid costly interruption or downtime," said Sherman Black, senior vice president, Seagate Core HDD Marketing and Strategy. "While many organizations are making the transition to 2.5-inch enterprise-class drives which include the Seagate Savvio drive family, 3.5-inch Cheetah drives are the leading standard for existing enterprise systems. Seagate remains committed to serving the market with a full lineup of storage solutions for a broad range of needs and budgets."

"External storage system OEMs continue to consume the majority of 3.5-inch performance-optimized HDDs shipped each quarter, whereas server manufacturers consumed nearly all of the 2.5-inch SFF performance-optimized HDDs that shipped in 2008," according to John Rydning, IDC's research director for hard disk drives. "Seagate's new 3.5-inch Cheetah disk drives with up to 600GBs of capacity will fill a critical need for both its customers and end users looking to extend the life of existing external storage system platforms."

"It's a core tenet of Dell's philosophy to offer our customers the best technology and services solutions to meet their needs," said Praveen Asthana, director of Dell Storage. "By offering a selection of these new drives from Seagate, we are able to provide our customers Tier 1 reliability at 600GB while empowering them to place their own priority on performance and power consumption."

The Cheetah 15K.7 and the Cheetah NS.2 drives are the second generation of Cheetah drives available as Self-Encrypting Drives for designated OEMs, providing government-grade data security, and instant secure erase for drives repurposed, reused, recycled, or returned for expired lease, repair or warranty.

"Many organizations are considering drive-level security for its simplicity in helping secure sensitive data through the hardware lifecycle from initial setup, to upgrade transitions and disposal," said Eric Ouellet, Gartner research vice president.

Cheetah 15K.7 Drive Specifications
Capacity 600, 450, 300GB
Interface 6Gb/s SAS-2.0, 4Gb/s FC
Spindle Speed 15,000 RPM
Seek Time 3.4 ms
Reliability 0.55% AFR / 1.6M hours MTBF
Cache 16MB
Form factor 3.5-inch

Cheetah NS.2 Drive Specifications
Capacity 600, 450, 300GB
Interface 6Gb/s SAS-2.0 (600 and 450 GB drives), 4Gb/s FC
Spindle Speed 10,000 RPM
Seek Time 3.8 ms
Reliability 0.55% AFR / 1.6M hours MTBF
Cache 16MB
Form factor 3.5-inch

The Cheetah NS.2 drive is available and shipping today.

The Cheetah 15K.7 drive is currently available for OEM qualifications and will start shipping next quarter to the channel.