Seagate has unveiled what it claims to be the world's fastest hard drive, the Savvio 15K, a 15,000-rpm addition to the Savvio family of 2.5in Serial Attached SCSI enterprise drives.

The Savvio 15K was recently validated as the world's fastest drive within the latest HP ProLiant family of servers, the drive vendor claimed.

Sherman Black, senior vice president and general manager at Seagate Enterprise Compute Business, said: "The development of the 2.5in Enterprise form factor represented a new way of thinking.

"With the added number of performance and capacity choices offered, many leading enterprise system makers are moving from 3.5in to 2.5in form factor enterprise solutions."

The move to small form factor enterprise disk drives is being driven by data centre requirements for greater storage performance density while focusing on lowering power consumption and cooling costs, according to Black.

The Savvio 15K drive offers a number of advantages over 15,000-rpm 3.5in drives. It is 70 per cent smaller, 0.5Kg lighter and requires 30 per cent less power.

The Savvio drive was built to accommodate a range of applications, from rapid-fire data access in transactional environments to everyday email.