Seagate opens fastest and largest drives to channel

The Cheetah 15K.7 drives come with an automatic self-encryption option

Seagate has released its fastest and largest capacity 3.5in hard drives to the channel, and said that original equipment manufacturers will be bringing the devices to market in the next few months.

The new Cheetah 15K.7 drives are available in capacities up to 600GB, and rotate at 15,000rpm, making them the fastest and largest the company has yet produced. They ship with 6Gbit/s serial attached SCSI and 4Gbit/s Fibre-Channel interfaces.

The drives also come with an automatic self-encryption option that writes all data onto the drive in an encrypted format for security.

"In large datacentres a lot of customers don't return drives for warranty repair because of data security. This allows them to do this," said Teresa Worth, senior product marketing manager at Seagate.

"From a channel perspective, sellers can use warranty repair but this also allows them to erase and reuse the drive. They can also recoup their costs on eBay."

Seagate claims that the drives have been built to last, and have an estimated average fail time of 1.6 million hours, or more than 182 years.

The drives have also been designed to be as power efficient as possible using Seagate's Powertrim technology. This optimises the drive's performance as needed, and shuts down sections of the control board where possible.

Worth said that, while the industry as a whole is moving towards the 2.5in form factor for drives, the recession means that companies are trying to make do with the systems they already have.