Seagate Aims New Enterprise HDDs at the Cloud

Aiming squarely at the data center, Seagate today announced three new hard disk drives (HDDs) that the company hopes will usher in denser and more energy efficient arrays from storage systems providers.

The company, aware that its drives could end up serving up data in both cloud environments or traditional networked storage infrastructures, is touting the drives’ improved capacity limits, faster performance and lowered power requirements.

Seagate’s vice president of Marketing, Scott Horn, observes, “Anyone building storage systems today, whether for cloud specific applications or enterprise data centers, is looking to maximize capacity in the smallest possible physical footprint with the lowest operating costs while ensuring long-term scalability.”

Seagate’s new enterprise HDDs are up to the challenge, says Horn. “Our new line of Enterprise hard drives meet this challenge, providing the highest capacity-to-power ratios while ensuring consistent performance and high reliability, making them ideal for use in any data center environment,” he added in a press statement.

First up is the Seagate Enterprise Value HDD line of 3.5-inch, 7,200 RPM drives. Available in capacities of 1, 2 and 3 TB, the drives feature a 6 Gbps SATA interface and Instant Secure Erase technology that renders data irretrievable in as little as one second.

Enterprise Value HDDs are also Seagate’s most efficient yet, according to the company, consuming 29 percent less power than rival offerings, and are therefore practically tailor-made for cloud services providers and eco-conscious data center operators.

Next is Seagate’s RAID optimized, Enterprise line (a.k.a. Constellation ES) of 3.5-inch drives that spin at 7,200 RPM. Capacity options include 1, 2, 3 and 4 TB. Buyers also get the choice between 6 Gbps SAS or SATA interfaces.

Seagate’s Enterprise HDDs offer the company’s third generation of its self-encrypting drive technology that conforms to SED FIPS U.S. federal government security standards, in addition to Seagate Instant Secure Erase. On the energy savings front, the drives support PowerChoice, which lowers power consumption during periods of inactivity.

Lastly, the hard drive maker unveiled the latest version of its Enterprise Performance 10K HDD (a.k.a. Savvio 10K.6). Topping out at 900 GB, the 10K RPM, self-encrypting unit is 14 percent more energy efficient than its predecessor. Versus larger form factor drives, it “delivers a staggering power consumption reduction of up to 71 percent compared to 15K-RPM, 3.5-inch drives,” claims Seagate.

The drives are also faster, says Seagate. With a 21 percent performance improvement over prior Savvios, the new drives deliver sustained data transfer rates that put them on equal footing with 3.5-inch, 15K RPM drives, according to the company.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Internet News, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.