As the appeal of small form factor drives in servers, particularly in power- and space-sensitive environments, more vendors have begun pushing the performance and reliability of these drives to make them worthy putting in mission-critical applications. Hitachi is entering that market, with the introduction of a "server-quality" 2.5" 147GB drive. It has very impressive stats for a tiny drive, with a 10,000RPM spindle speed and a 16MB cache, being offered with a SAS interface.
The number of 10,000RPM 2.5" drives available is increasing, as is their capacity. The price premium on these drives is a far cry from what it was at their first introduction, though they are still pretty expensive compared to a similar 10k 3.5" part. These units from Hitachi will start making their rounds in before the second half of this year.