Introduction

In February 2004 Seagate Technology announced the world's first 2.5 inch form factor enterprise hard drive. The product series was Savvio and although the first year was a little slow, the market has now caught on and the 2.5 inch standard has taken off like a rocket. Unlike notebook and most solid state drives, Seagate's enterprise drives are 12.5mm tall and do not fit in a majority of notebooks due to the height and SAS interface.

While the consumer market has been slow to adapt the 2.5 inch form factor standard, progress is being made. The QNAP TS-419P we just reviewed weeks ago was the first consumer level NAS to accept both 2.5 and 3.5 inch drives. QNAP also has a couple of 2.5 inch only NAS servers in their product line up. SSDs have been a hot topic for the past year and desktop chassis manufacturers are starting to include 2.5 inch adapters in their cases.

Real progress for 2.5 is coming from the enterprise market where many servers have been launched with bays only for these miniature drives. The premise is simple; smaller drives means you can fit more in the same amount of space. When it comes to rack mount servers space comes at a premium and it is sold in 1.75 inch sections. In a typical 1U server where the hard drives are mounted in removable bays, you could fit four 3.5 inch bays. Take that same server and configure it for 2.5 inch drives and you can add an extra row vertically and horizontally to make it a ten drive server.

The Seagate Savvio 15K.2 is a second generation 2.5 inch form factor hard drive that uses the SAS 2.0, 6Gb/s interface. Let's move on and check out the full specifications.