Seagate Launches Biggest Comprehensive Enterprise HDD and SSD Lineup

Savvio 15K.3 and 10K.5

Even though Seagate has created themselves a new category of storage in SSDs, they still recognize that not everything can or should be accomplished with SSDs. Not only does it create a whole slew of issues, but its simply not cost effective. In order to be more cost effective, Seagate has a multi-tiered system with SSDs being at the top and 3.5” extra-large drives at the bottom. The Savvio 15K.3 sits right below the SSDs in performance while still saving quite a bit of space as they are in the 2.5” form factor; and the Savvio 10K.5 right below it. Both these drives have data security and power saving features that make them extremely attractive to the enterprise space.

The Savvio 15K.3 is still a very high-performance drive that still gives the benefits of being a physical spinning drive. Furthermore, because it is a 15K RPM drive, it is extremely fast… to the point where it is comparable to some consumer SSDs. The Savvio 15K.3 comes in two sizes, 146GB and 300Gb which both require an SAS interface but run are capable of utilizing SAS 6Gb/s. The average seek time on the Savvio 15K.3 is also ridiculous as it is a measly 2.6ms for reads and 3.1ms for writes on the 300GB model. Furthermore, Seagate claims that this drive is literally the fastest hard drive available today. While we cannot necessarily validate these claims until we have tested these drives, Seagate states that the drives should be capable of sustained transfer rates of 202 to 151MB/s. On top of that, Seagate has also significantly increased the cache of their drives by quadrupling it to 64MB from a previous 16MB.


The Savvio 10K.5 is their slightly slower HDD compared to the Pulsar and Savvio 15K.3 but is still capable of some of the fastest HDD performance figures in a hard drive today. The Savvio 10K.5 comes in 300GB, 450GB, 600GB and 900GB capacities and is available in the 6Gb/s SAS and 4Gb/s Fibre Channel. As far as we know, the 900GB drive is the biggest 10K RPM drive to date. Also, the 900GB model has seek times of 3.7 and 4.1 ms for read and write while the other drives have seek times of 3.4 and 3.8 respectively. The performance on these drives is a little slower than the 15K RPM and Solid State drives, but is still very comparable to other 10K RPM drives out there. Currently, Seagate claims speeds of 168to 93MB/s which are partially backed by the 64MB of cache like the 10K.5 drive. On top of that, these drives have very low idle power ranging from 3.5w on the 300GB model up to 4.4w on the 900GB model. In total, performance and wattage per gigabyte are improved.  At the moment of publication, Seagate has not provided us with the random seek power consumption, but we will update this article as those come in.