Seagate is claiming they've created the "world's fastest hard drive" with their new Enterprise Turbo SSHD, the industry's first enterprise-class solid state hybrid drive. The drive combines a high-RPM hard disk with a SSD-like NAND module, increasing the "mission critical" hard drive random performance and providing the best speeds for the most accessed files on the drive .

The company has made two claims in releasing the Enterprise Turbo SSHD: a 10K-RPM version of the drive delivers twice the IOPS performance of a standard 600 GB 10K-RPM drive, while the top-end model provides up to three times the random performance of a comparable standard 15K-RPM drive. The drive will also allow affordable, fast storage for enterprises, according to Seagate, although no pricing information was announced.

In terms of what the Enterprise Turbo SSHD provides, the highest-end model combines 600 GB of storage on the hard disk and 32 GB of NAND storage used for caching at the I/O level. The hard disk's speed wasn't specified, but it will likely be 15K-RPM. The drive fits into a 2.5-inch form factor, and comes with a 5-year warranty along with "enterprise endurance and reliability".

Seagate says that this drive has been tested for months in conjunction with IBM, who have adapted the technology for their own drives which - as a 600 GB 10K-RPM drive with 16 GB of NAND - are already an option for IBM System x servers.

Rocky Pimentel, executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer at Seagate, says that the Enterprise Turbo SSHD delivers "a no compromise drive that provides high-speed performance while enabling customers to leverage all of Turbo's capacity." The result, according to him, is "a real game changer" and "a new paradigm shift for mission critical, enterprise storage".