Seagate ships first 3.5-inch perpendicular drive

Ever since we saw that flash movie from Hitachi, the incredibly educational disco-tinged animation that practically inspired the perpendicular "revolution" as we know it, we've been waiting for the tech to make residence on those huge 3.5-inch platters in our desktops. Well, that time has finally come, with Seagate dropping their new Cheetah 15K.5 drives with up to 300GB of space. The 15,000 rpm drives claim to offer 30% better performance than their predecessors, and have a sustained data rate around 73-125 MB/s. You'll of course need SCSI, Ultra320 SCSI or fiber hookups to enjoy this speed, and you should be able to nab you very own 300GB, 147GB or 73GB drive this June. No price is announced as of yet, but it doesn't look like they'll be giving these away.

[Samuel McConnell @ Apr 18th 2006 12:04AM]

No SATA-II? I'm disappointed.

[mattm @ Apr 18th 2006 12:08AM]

It requires Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) - not just 'SCSI'

[robert @ Apr 18th 2006 12:25AM]

is it just me or are those dancing bits really scary

[Woolly Mittens @ Apr 18th 2006 12:38AM]

First they made me drool with the prospect of having an affordable >100GB 2.5" portable usb drive, then they started making amazing-but-too-small-capacity 1" ipod drives, after which they jumped straight upto too-large-to-power from USB 3.5".

Someone wake me when they get to the right size, for me.

[John Doe @ Apr 18th 2006 1:09AM]

Yo Seagate. Where's my SATA 2.5" 160GB hard drive. I want it now damn it!

[OOps @ Apr 18th 2006 2:12AM]

Now if I could jimmy that into my macbook pro, my battery would last a whole 3 minutes!

[Andrew @ Apr 18th 2006 2:39AM]

Could someone enlighten me because I really don't know. Will this tend to make 10,000 rpm's the standard? Or will that just never really come and 7200 is where it's going to be at for a long long time...Thanks

Andrew

[paris @ Apr 18th 2006 6:23AM]

Sorry but no thanks. I think I'll wait a couple of years of Flash Hard Drives.

[Udayan Tripathi @ Apr 18th 2006 6:35AM]

I loved that video and just for that I'm buying this drive. Get Perpendicular!

[Sylvain Gagnon @ Apr 18th 2006 6:57AM]

Finally, a high capacity, high speed drive for my SERVERS :-)

You guys realise this was meant for SERVERS, rights?

[charlie @ Apr 18th 2006 9:31AM]

Meh, if they released these drives for SATA-II and competed with the raptor they'd definitely sell a few. People are always looking for cheap storage, and SAS is unnecessarily expensive considering that 300MBps from SATA-II which is included on most decent motherboards is more than fast enough for a 15k drive.

[VibroKatana @ Apr 18th 2006 9:50AM]

The cheetah line is designed for high-end servers, to complain about no sata support is plain stuipid, why would seagate cripple such a awsome drive with a pokey sata-scsi translation layer?

[phlavor @ Apr 18th 2006 1:53PM]

I am just... It's... Wha....

My head is spinning here. Somebody explain to me why if... OK say you're a drive manufacturer and you come out with a process that enables you to fit more bits on a drive platter. Here's what I want to know: Why would you then screw around for the next year with said technology and make your tiny drives a tiny bit bigger or make your server drives (that count for another small slice of business) bigger, when what you could be doing is MAKING LARGER CAPACITY CONSUMER DRIVES AT A LOWER COST AND LAUGHING AS THE OTHER COMPANIES' SALES FALL OFF LIKE A PROM DRESS?

Now, I'm not one to armchair CEO but these guys are sitting on a gold mine and it's frustrating to watch them squander it.

[JAM @ Apr 18th 2006 3:23PM]

#14 - perhaps the technology isn't perfected to the point that mass production for consumer consumption is economically viable. Server purchases are driven by performance, where average consumer purchases are driven by space/cost ratio. After they improve the production process from correcting the mistakes made in this server oriented line they'll be able make a cheaper variant, but that's no guarantee that it will be cheap enough for the average Joe.

[Scott Johnson @ Apr 18th 2006 4:18PM]

If you have to ask about the price on a Cheetah, you really don't need one. ;-)

[Enterprise Dude @ Apr 18th 2006 11:57PM]

#15 - Your comment makes no sense. Enterprise purchases are driven by *stability* and *reliability* first, not performance.

My guess is they cater to the enterprise market first because the margins are higher (when it's the company that pays, purchasers tend to me a little more lenient) and they can get to their ROI breakeven faster than the low-margin pissing contests in the retail market.

[hoochie @ Sep 15th 2006 12:22AM]

That guy up there is way off, All sata hard drives in existence put out a maxium average of 300mbits per second, wich is in reality only 32 Mega-Bytes per second, SCSI puts out between 60 Mega-Bytes to 125 MEGA-BYTES per second when the cpu accesses the scsi controler, wich is more than double any sata drive available, stacked parallel scsi drives can go up to a real 300 MEGA-BYTES per second with a true parallel ultra320 scsi adapters (not SAS) there is no faster mechanical drive than parallel scsi stacks exept ram drives or fiber channel. Kanguru 64 gig flash drives are the slowest drives ever with
a brutal 1 MB per second writes and 2500$
price tags.

[hoochie @ Sep 15th 2006 12:46AM]

actually i just read kangurus specs are up to 5MB/sec ? thats a bit better, still at least an average of 3 hours to write 64gb