Seagate, whose customers include EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), is interested in promoting the Small Form Factor as an industry standard for enterprise-class drives. Gentry notes that the 2.5-inch form factor is already an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard.
"Nothing gets big in this industry without a second source," Gentry says.
The 2.5-inch drives will operate at 10,000 RPM because the smaller size won't handle 15K speeds, Seagate says. "You can't spin something that small and thin at 15K," Gentry says. "You have to manage things like air flow and turbulence."
But Randy Kerns, senior analyst at Evaluator Group, says the Seagate SFF drive isn't really a huge deal. "It's a natural progression of disk technology," he says.
The larger problem that the industry needs to solve, he says, is "access density": The fact that the performance of enterprise drives has been steadily declining in relation to their capacity. In other words, the number of I/O operations per second (IOPS) per Gbyte has been on a downward trajectory in recent years. "It's the electromechanical problem of rotating media," he says. "The disks can't spin fast enough."
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