Seagate have just announced a new 2.5" 15K-rpm enterprise class hard drive as a member of their Savvio lineup, which they claim to be the fastest in the world to date. Apparently the "Savvio 15K" has a seek time of only 2.9ms and is said to be around 10% faster then typical 3.5" sized 15K-RPM drives.

However, even with perpendicular recording methods, they've only managed to squeeze a maximum of 73GB into this drive (with an optional 36GB model also available), not that capacity is all that important when one opts for a drive in this class.

The Tech Report and DailyTech both have more info on it.

Seagate Technology has announced what it claims to be "the world's fastest hard drive" - the Savvio 15K with a seek time of a mere 2.9 ms. The new 15K-RPM addition to the Savvio family offers a number of advantages over 15K-rpm 3.5-inch drives including size and weight (due to 2.5-inch form factor), 30% decrease in power consumption (5.8 watts at idle), and reliability (1.6 million hour MTBF).

"Seagate is committed to delivering solutions that will meet the needs of today's demanding IT environment, and no product demonstrates this better than the Savvio 15K drive," said Sherman Black, senior vice president and general manager, Seagate Enterprise Compute Business. "The development of the 2.5-inch Enterprise form factor represented a new way of thinking. Now, with the added number of performance and capacity choices offered, many of the leading enterprise system makers are transitioning from 3.5-inch to 2.5-inch form factor enterprise solutions."