Introduction

Like any form of computer technology, hard disk drives have seen constant improvements in form factor, speed, and efficiency. Whether it be improvements in size or interfaces, consumer and enterprise level storage has come a long way since the introduction of the ST-506, Seagate’s (and the market’s) first 5.25" hard drive. This size was relatively short lived when it was usurped in 1984 by the 3.5" form factor when it was first used by a hard drive introduced by the now defunct Rodime company. For quite some time, this drive size has been the industry standard for consumer and enterprise storage solutions. Even though the first 2.5" drive was introduced quite some time ago to satisfy demand for laptops, the first enterprise grade 2.5" didn’t come along until much later.

In 2004, Seagate introduced the Savvio product line to their catalog. The Savvio series is a 2.5" enterprise-level storage product that comes in a variety of capacities and spindle speeds, with the very first model sporting a 10,000 RPM rotational speed. The Savvio can be seen as being the (literally) little brother of Seagate’s renowned Cheetah line, but nothing about the Savvio drives outside of their physical size is diminutive. These are drives targeted for use in the same applications as their larger brethren are, and with their reduction in size comes the benefit of lower power consumption, less usage of physical space and in the case of some of the drives featured, equivalent or higher performance. The last of which is a key selling point to data centers who are looking to reduce their power consumption, but not at the expense of performance.

However, the 3.5" form factor is far from becoming irrelevant or passé just yet; It’s going to take some years before a significant percentage of 3.5" drives in all market sectors are phased out, and with the popularity of the 2.5" format becoming more apparent, drive manufacturers may squeeze additional sales by attractively pricing the physically larger drives in their inventory while they beef up R&D on 2.5" drives. It’s also worth noting that the smaller drives currently can’t offer the sheer amount of storage space that their 3.5" counterparts currently can. This issue, however, is just a matter of time. At the present, Seagate’s 2.5" Constellation offers 500GB of storage space, which is impressive for such a physically tiny unit.

Being somewhat of a storage technology enthusiast, I was thrilled to know that Seagate would be providing me with some test units to crunch numbers on. I had been out of the game for quite some time, but I felt an itch to write on the subject again. Having a renewed interest in storage technology, I put in a request to try out some of the company’s newer offerings. My contact had suggested doing a trend piece, comparing the performance of their 3.5" Cheetah drives to a few of their 2.5" drives. With this in mind, Seagate graciously provided five hard drives to benchmark. Two of them being traditionally sized 3.5" drives, and the remainder of the lineup being comprised of Seagate’s shiniest and newest 2.5" lineup.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11