Seagate ships 15,000-rpm perpendicular drive

Perpendicular technology will be moving to enterprise storage later this year with the release of a 15,000-rpm Cheetah drive from Seagate Technology.

Seagate announced the new drive, which uses perpendicular technology, Tuesday.

The Cheetah 15K.5 is being shipped to OEM customers now and will be launched to the distribution channel later this quarter. Although drives using the technology have been out for a while, this is the first one to spin at 15,000 rpm -- making it suitable for enterprise-class storage systems.

"The 30 percent increase in sustained transfer rates is the biggest boost in performance since the 15K rpms came out several years ago," said Kenneth J. Kucera, senior vice president and CIO of the First National Bank of Omaha. Kucera said he hopes the technology will be key to improving two hard disk drive components: performance and capacity.

How does perpendicular technology work? It involves standing the magnetic fields representing data bits upright. Most current drives use longitudinal recording, in which magnetic fields lay flat on the disk surface. Standing them upright means they take up less space, enabling more to be packed on the disk and storage capacity to be increased.

The Cheetah 15K.5 will replace the company's flagship 15K.4 and can transfer data at 125MB/sec. It is available in 3Gbit/sec. Serial Attached SCSI, Ultra320 SCSI and 4Gbit/sec. Fibre Channel interfaces, and offers capacities of 73GB, 147GB and 300GB.