Introduction

Seagate’s 10,000 RPM enterprise drive lineup hasn’t quite received the attention that their 15,000 RPM line has, but Seagate is still churning out 3.5" 10,000 RPM Cheetahs via their Cheetah NS line. The latest offering, the Cheetah NS.2, is the focus of this latest hardware review. The Cheetah NS.2, like its faster counterpart the Cheetah 15K.7, is a welcome advance in that it is the highest capacity 10,000 RPM drive currently available on the market. At 600GB, the Cheetah NS.2 offers a solid mixture of speed and value for those who aren’t willing to pony up the dough for faster 15K series drives.

For this review, I decided to let the numbers do the talking for us. Methodologies for all of the tests have been covered by my first hard drive review, so there will no detailed explanation of testing procedures in this article. Here’s the full spread of drives I used for comparison in this write-up:

The Cheetah 15K.5 is a great choice for comparison because its performance has often intersected that of the Savvio 10K.3. The Cheetah 15K.6 is obviously the highest performing drive in the set, and it serves to illustrate the difference between the 15,000 and 10,000 RPM tiers. The Savvio 10K.3 is an obvious choice for competition, and particular attention ought to be paid to its performance against that of the Cheetah NS.2, since they are of different form factors and capacities, but share the same spindle speed.

Up first, we have some basic figures from HDTach.

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