text: Seagate 15,000 RPM drives - Geek.com
  Seagate 15,000 RPM drives
  By admin 02.24.2000 :: 3:21PM EDT 02.24.2000
  seagate has announced its intentions to produce a line of scsi hard drives dubbed the cheetah 15x.
  the drives will spin at 15,000 revolutions per minute (rpm). this is a 50% improvement over the previous top spin speed of 10,000 rpm that seagate and several other vendors have available in their scsi hard drive lines. ide drives still top out at 7200 rpm.
  the cheetah x15s will feature a 3.9 ms average seek time (compared to 5.2 ms for the fastest 10k drives) and ultra160 scsi (1.28 gbit) or two gbit fibre-channel interfaces. they will also contain 4 or 16 mb of cache, with internal data rates of up to 48 mb/second. the drives will be available first in 18gb capacity.
  the cheetah x15 18 gb will be sampling in early q2 2000 with volume production by early q3 2000 and will be priced under us$1000. seagate estimates that it is two quarters (6 months) ahead of the competition (ibm, quantum) in bringing 15,000 rpm technology to market.
  read more at seagate.
  i had heard rumors recently that 15,000 rpm would be the next step, but having the drives available for the second half of this year will be fantastic. when available, they will make worthy additions to our dream workstation.
  for consumers, these drives are out of most people's price ranges, but their availability may signal the coming of 10,000 rpm ide drives. this would be great for consumers, so hopefully we will hear some news about this before the end of the year.
  the problems facing high rpm drives are excessive heat, noise, and power consumption. you can burn yourself on early 10,000 rpm scsi drives, but that has improved somewhat, so we'll have to see how 15,000 rpm drives handle heat. as well, i had a 10,000 rpm drive in a system in my office for a while, and it made a high pitched whine that i am glad to be rid of. that's not a big problem in a server room, but you don't want that in an office unless absolutely necessary.