Seagate unveils new 3.5-inch Cheetah drives

Seagate has unveiled its fastest and largest capacity enterprise-class drives to the channel. The new 3.5-inch Cheetah 15K.7 spins its platters at a blazing fast 15,000 RPM, yielding an average rotational latency of just two milliseconds, and pushes capacity up to 600GB. While that may be nowhere near the 2TB capacity offered on its 7,200 RPM Constellation line, it's a nice boost from previous Cheetah drives which topped at 450GB.

The new Cheetah 15K.7 drives will ship in 300GB, 450GB and 600GB versions, with 4Gbps Fiber Channel or 6Gbps SAS 2.0 interfaces. Drive-based encryption is also available as an option. All of the drives come with 16MB of DRAM cache, have an expected MTBF of 1.6 million hours and are backed by a five-year warranty. They’ve also been designed to be as power efficient as possible using Seagate's Powertrim technology, which dynamically optimizes power consumption without affecting speed.

Performance-wise, Seagate’s latest drives still lag behind high-end SSDs but may prove a great alternative for capacity hungry environments.