Today there is a huge range of sizes, speeds and interfaces for hard drives. Currently IDE is still the primary interface for hard drives, mainly due to its more affordable price when compared to other high-end interfaces like SCSI. Unfortunately, the more affordable IDE hard drive makes way for many system performance issues, making IDE hard drives one of the slowest non-removable devices in a computer. Since everything is stored on the hard drive including the O/S, the low transfer rates are really going to kill overall system performance. This is where Serial ATA is designed to take over, eliminating the bottleneck created by the parallel IDE interface.

The average parallel IDE ATA100 7200 RPM hard drive can transfer up to about 10-15MB/s under most conditions. IDE RAID is an option that can increase this transfer rate by using two ATA100 7200 RPM hard drives in a high-synchronized mode. This gives the RAID hard drives anywhere between 20-30MB/s. Serial ATA is obviously going to pickup where IDE left off, but there is still another interface that continues to evolve. This alternative interface is known as SCSI and has been around for many years. SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) is a much more efficient storage type when compared to the IDE interface. Being several times faster than IDE makes SCSI much more efficient.

Generally, SCSI is more popular for high-end servers rather than desktop computers. However, the interface is slowly becoming more affordable, making it more popular for the high-end user. SCSI has a lot to offer desktop users over ATA100 and even SATA150. Not only will data transfer rates be much faster, but the average hard drive-intense application will perform much faster. Games like Doom 3 for example will load much faster and when installing programs from the hard drive, significant speed increases will also become evident.

Seagate offer various SCSI based products but none are more interesting than the new Savvio 10K.1 hard drive. The Savvio is the worlds first 2.5-inch form factor enterprise class disk drive. Seagate claim to have incorporated intelligent miniaturized components to deliver the industrys most potent combination of size and access speed. The Savvio measures just 2.5-inchs in length and boasts a spindle speed of 10,000 RPM with a current capacity of either 36 or 73 gigabytes. The key advantage of the Savvio hard drive is obviously the space saving technology. These smaller drive sizes allow integration of more drives into a smaller chassis like 1U servers or modular storage arrays.

The Savvio series also provides an IOPS (Input Output Per Second) improvement over the larger, conventional 3.5-inch, 10,000 RPM drives. These hard drives also support the broadest range of interface options which includes, Ultra320 SCSI, 2-Gbit/sec Fiber Channel and SAS (Serial Attached SCSI). Seagate believe that inevitably cost, performance and other issues will drive data centers to decrease reliance on the traditional 3.5-inch form factor. Despite being incredibly compact, another critical component of these Savvio hard drives is their stability. Savvio drives feature a MTBF of 1.4 million hours; this makes them about 15% more reliable than previous generation 10K, 3.5-inch products. Now that you have a better understanding of what these new Savvio drives are all about, lets have a more in-depth look into their design and features.