Seagate Cheetah 15K.5

[Imy]

Seagate recently announced a new Cheetah model, the 15K.5 and have started shipping to leading OEM customers.

The previous model is already a beast at 15,000 rpm and has excellent seek times but this new model boasts a 30% increase in performance over the previous one due to its use of perpendicular storage. It also offers twice the storage capacity (up to 300GB).

The Cheetah 15K.5 is available in a choice of 3 Gb/sec Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Ultra320 SCSI, and 4 Gb/sec Fibre Channel interfaces with capacities of 73, 147, and 300 gigabytes.

I know that there is some level of compatibility between SAS and SATA. I know that you can use a SATA drive with a SAS controller but is it possible to use a SAS drive (like the Cheetah 15K.5) in a standard desktop machine connected to the motherboard's SATA controller? If so, the 73GB Cheetah 15K.5 would make an excellent (although more expensive) alternative to the Raptor 150GB as a windows/programs/games drive I think.

What you guys reckon - do we have a Raptor killer here?

 

[Imy]

So how much is a basic SAS controller these days? Nothing fancy, just something with 2 ports or so and RAID 0 support.

 

[Imy]

Would that work in a standard PCI slot as well? Would it become a bottleneck even if it did?

Had a quick look for a PCI-E SAS controller and cheapest one I found was £500+.

No chance of building a gaming machine with one of these drives then

 

[Imy]

Thanks Swanster for clearing that up for me

It looks like then the two Raptor 150GB drives in RAID 0 is still the smarter choice. I was hoping a single Seagate 15.5K drive may beat the dual Raptors in cost but with the added cost of a controller card, it takes it well over.

 

[Imy]

Ok no luck on finding a cheap SAS controller BUT since a drive like this would probably go in a high-end machine with a high-end motherboard, how about getting a motherboard with on-board SAS support. Check out the motherboard at the top of this page.

The motherboard also features two mini-SAS connectors, that each can provide four SAS/SATA connectors using a 1-to-4 splitter cable.

The motherboard supports dual-opteron CPU's. Unlike most server motherboards I've seen, this one supports dual PCIe 16x slots so you could realistically use it in a high-end gaming machine.

EDITED: it was the opteron board, not the woodcrest one that had the SAS support.

 

[Imy]

1) I dont think they are compatable.
2) Iam estimating £700 each at the minimum if not more.
3) Its a high end enterprise drive and you want to use it in a consumer level motherboard?, these drives really need an appropriate SAS H/W RAID card not onboard SATA stuff, you will lose so much performance in not doing so.

1) Not sure what you mean here.... why wouldn't a SAS drive be compatible with an on-board SAS controller?

2) You don't have to go for the 300GB model. There are 73GB, and 147GB models available also. The 73GB would do fine as a windows/games/programs drive. You can currently pick up the 15K.4 model equivalents for around £144, £279 and £523 for the 36GB, 73GB and 146GB drives respectively. Also worth noting that with the introduction of Seagate's new perpendicular desktop drives, prices actually went down (per GB) rather than up.

3) In a high end RAID 5 setup I would go for a dedicated hardware based controller as you suggest but for a single drive on its own or two in RAID 0, I doubt it'll make a huge difference. The motherboard mentioned in my previous post is actually server-grade and not a general consumer motherboard. Its not that uncommon these days to see server-grade hardware in desktop machines, especially those belonging to enthusiasts. Isn't that the whole point of the Raptor?

Why the lower model number than the 15k.6 drives?

The currently available Seagate Cheetah drives are part of the 15K.4 family. The new ones are 15K.5.