Small drives cross performance threshold

Seagate announced a new, faster class of 2.5-inch hard drives on Tuesday, an important part of the effort to get the smaller devices to replace the 3.5-inch drives that currently prevail in much of the server market.

Seagate's new Savvio 15K spins at 15,000 revolutions per minute, which means data can be found and retrieved faster than with preceding 10,000rpm 2.5-inch models.

That's important in particular for servers, which often run multiple jobs simultaneously and therefore need to access data scattered across the drive. And computing jobs often are constrained by the time it takes for a hard drive to start sending requested data as well as the speed with which it can send it.

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