Seagate Technology announced it will begin shipping its new Cheetah(R) 15K.6 hard drive this month. Designed for the world's most demanding enterprise storage environments, the Cheetah 15K.6 drive is Seagate's highest- performance hard drive ever in a 3.5-inch form factor, with a 28% increase in sustained data transfer rates compared to previous generations. With this new performance on tap, the Cheetah 15K.6 drive remarkably consumes significantly less power, using up to 61% less energy in both idle and operational modes.

Major OEM system builders including HP are working to design in the new Cheetah equipped with its leading Fibre Channel interface for HP's SAN storage systems. "HP's Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), incorporating Seagate's latest Cheetah 15K.6 drive, will fulfill the needs of our most demanding customers running mission-critical business applications," said Kyle Fitze, director, StorageWorks SAN Marketing, at HP. "The improvements in performance, reliability, power savings, and capacity will collectively help enable our own EVA systems to deliver greater overall value to our customers."

The Cheetah 15K.6 drive also ships in Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), which has become the mainstream enterprise interface of choice for companies including Super Micro Computer, Inc. "Many of our customers require top-of- the-line performance and system efficiency," said Charles Liang, CEO and president of Supermicro. "Integrating Seagate's Cheetah 15K.6 drive into our 85%+ high-efficiency, earth-friendly SuperServers(TM) and Server Building Block Solutions(R) delivers not only superior performance, but also power savings, scalability and significantly reduced TCO."

Using second-generation perpendicular recording technology and available in capacities of 450GB, 300GB, and 147GB, the new Cheetah 15K.6 drive provides an unprecedented blend of storage capacity and performance. Add to this the highest 3.5-inch hard drive reliability in the industry at 1.6 million hours MTBF (0.55% AFR), a choice of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces, and a 5-year warranty, and the Cheetah 15K.6 drive becomes the clear drive of choice for 3.5-inch SAN, NAS, and other transactional processing and internet applications.

The Cheetah 15K.6 drive includes Seagate PowerTrim(TM) technology which dynamically optimizes drive power consumption at all levels of activity. With PowerTrim(TM) technology, the Cheetah 15K.6 drive delivers the highest performance in its class without increasing power consumption. The Cheetah 15K.6 drive lowers idle and operational power requirements from its prior generation - as much as 61% in watts/GB - while increasing overall sustained data transfer rates by 28% at 164MB/sec.