Storage company Compellent Technologies – better known for enterprise oriented products like the Storage Center SAN – has disclosed plans to upgrade notebook drives with faster speeds and higher capacities. Speaking at its C-Drive conference, company representatives suggested a 900GB 2.5-inch drive will soon be capable of running at 10,000 RPM. That's a 50% improvement over Western Digital's latest VelociRaptor line of 10K spinners.
Compellent also said to be working on a 15,000 RPM drive in the smaller form factor for notebooks, although initial capacity will be limited to 300GB. Nevertheless such speeds would certainly blow away benchmarks from every other notebook hard drive, and may give may give traditional HDDs a little more juice as solid state drives grow in popularity.
It's unclear if these would be SAS drives, or SATA-based, but at least initially we suspect they will target the enterprise sector. No drive manufacturer has announced plans to bring this size or speed HDDs to market, and naturally there's been no mention of price either. Both STEC and Seagate maintained a presence at the C-Drive conference.