Seagate Cheetah 15k.7 600GB SAS HDD Storage   Page 1

Reviewer: RWL Staff Article Publish Date: 3/4/2011

 

 

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

 

 

 

    With SSD prices still quite high many of you keep wondering about what’s the fastest drive out there with the best storage/price ratio. A few months ago we brought you some of the fastest enterprise HDDs made by Seagate, the Constellation ES SAS. These drives proved to be incredibly fast even though they came with just a rotational speed of 7200 due to several optimizations and no doubt thanks to their SAS connectivity and also the LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i card we used for testing. However Seagate has another product line which is even faster, the Cheetah 15k.7.

 

 

    Founded in 1979, Seagate is the leading provider of storage devices–in 2008, we became the first hard drive manufacturer to ship 1 billion hard drives–with the industry’s broadest product offering. Our products include 2.5–inch and 3.5–inch hard disk drives, solid state drives and hybrid drives (which incorporate both rotating media and flash memory) for compute–intensive enterprise environments that demand high performance, low–power consumption and proven reliability. In 2009, Seagate developed its first solid–state drives (SSDs) that leverage non–volatile flash memory instead of spinning magnetic media. Seagate’s first SSDs were designed for enterprise environments utilizing blade and general server applications. We followed that up in 2010 with a solid state hybrid drive for laptops–a product with a unique algorithm that enables the drive to “learn” which files are needed most often and then places them in the drive’s on–board flash memory for lightning–fast access. Seagate’s products enable high–performance desktop and laptop systems, along with ultraportable devices such as netbooks and thin laptops. We delivered the industry’s first 2TB, 7,200–RPM desktop hard drive, along with the world’s first 7mm, 2.5–inch form factor drive. These innovative storage products deliver super–sized capacities, industry–leading performance, encrypted security features and more.

 

 

    Although the Seagate Cheetah 15k.7 has been around for over a year they come with a rotational speed of 15000 and the same SAS connectivity as the Constellation ES SAS models. So our goal today is to take that particular model for a spin in order to see how much better (if at all) it is than standard and Constellation ES hard disk drives in the market. Of course there's no doubt that solid state drives (SSD) are faster and silent but even models with 1/5 of the capacity cost the same and some cost even more so even buying an SAS card still keeps the cost quite lower. Noise levels could be the only real issue but as you will see later on things are not as bad as with other 15k HDD solutions in the market, not even close to be precise.