History: The fastest hard disk in the world is 25 years old

10,000 revolutions per minute was the standard speed for fast server hard disks at the end of the last millennium. Although Hitachi had once announced a hard disk with 12,000 revolutions, it never came onto the market. At CeBIT 2000, Seagate then came forward: With 15,000 revolutions per minute, the Cheetah X15 easily took the top spot. In the disk carousel of c't, issue 16/2000, we certified a transfer rate of almost 40 MByte/s for the turbo rotor with its 18.4 GB of storage space. The access times were also very low at just 3.2 ms. Seagate promised an increase in data transfer rate of around 25 percent compared to drives with 10,000 rpm.

Rudy Thibodeau, then Executive Director of Enterprise Product Marketing at Seagate, even believed in an even higher rotation speed: the next logical step should be 20,000 rpm. However, he pointed out that this would not necessarily lead to enormous advantages, as the so-called seek time for searching for the correct data track would only be reduced slightly. According to him, the disks would have to rotate at 30,000 revolutions per minute to achieve a seek time of 1 ms.

Quiet despite high rotational speed

At that time, five disks with 3.7 GByte each were rotating in the disk; the drive cache was 4 MByte. The Ceetah X15 consumed around 11 watts in idle mode and 12.5 watts in operation. In our low-noise measurement chamber, we measured an operating noise of 4.4 sone – other drives were considerably louder despite significantly lower performance. The disk was available with the Ultra160 SCSI connection that was common for servers at the time, and Seagate also promised a version with 2 Gbit Fibre Channel.

Hard disks with 15,000 rpm have long since disappeared from server racks, and the 10,000 rpm drives have also been replaced by SSDs. Hard disk development is concentrating on more and more storage space in 3.5-inch housings. Seagate has now introduced a 36 TByte hard disk.

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