Fujitsu launches SAS-II SFF drives

November 18, 2008 | 11:23

Tags: #25 #drive #enterprise #laptop #rack #raid #sas #sata #sff #small-form-factor

Companies: #fujitsu #seagate

IF you're always on the lookout to squeeze that last little bit of extra performance out of your box – and money is no object – you'll be pleased to read about the latest hard drives from Fujitsu.

As The Register reports, the company has launched a range of SAS-II (Serial Attached SCSI) 10,000 and 15,000 RPM drives capable of transferring data at a whopping 6Gb/s.

Aimed firmly at the enterprise market, the basic 10K RPM model – the MBD2 – will be available early 2009 in sizes available up to 300GB. Its meatier brother – the MBE2 – sacrifices maximum capacity for speed with a smaller 146GB being spun up to an eye-watering 15,000 RPM. Perhaps not surprisingly considering the target market, Fujistu has been a bit quiet on pricing.

Both drives are, interestingly, in the 2.5” form factor – a radical departure from the more common 3.5” form factor preferred by corporations. More commonly associated with laptops, the smaller form factor allows for smaller motors – which, in turn, means the drives consume less power than their full-size counterparts. Indeed, Fujitsu is hoping that by using smaller drives its customers will be able to cram more individual devices into a rack – meaning a massive increase in IO operations per second, and better benchmark results, for the same space and power consumption.

While Fujitsu is the latest company to attempt to break into the enterprise storage market with its small form factor drives, it's by no means the first: that honour goes to Seagate which has already launched similar SAS-II drives. While the Fujitsu 15K model has the edge in capacity – by a whole gigabyte – the Seagate Savvio drives are available with hardware-based encryption, an option sadly lacking from Fujistu's offering.

Tempted to set up a mini-RAID with these little disks that punch well above their weight on an Asus P6T Deluxe? Or are you waiting for a SATA 6Gb/s 10-15k RPM unit at a less 'enterprise' price point? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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