TechReport has published an article stating that hard drive manufacturer Seagate has released a 2.5" hard drive with platters spinning at 15,000 revolutions per minute.

The new hard Savvio 15K drive, part of Seagate's Savvio line, is stated to be 10% faster than its 3.5" 15,000 RPM hard drive. Surprisingly, the drive's smaller form factor helps the speed, despite Seagate only being able to squeeze about 36 gigabytes of data onto the Savvio drive's platters, a change which results in fewer gigabytes per actuator. Given that the actuator speed is what often limits performance in enterprise server environments, less data for each actuator to manage helps boost its speed, or at least in applications that highlight random access times as opposed to sequential transfer rates.

The new Savvio 15K hard drive, which is SCSI-based, is already shipping in volume to Hewlett-Packard and will be released this quarter in 36 gigabyte and 73 gigabyte capacities. The drives will feature a 16 megabyte cache and SAS interface. Current tests of the 73 gigabyte Savvio 15K has shown that the drive sports a seek time of 2.9 milliseconds, consumes only 5.8 watts of power and rates at 1.6 million hours of mean time before failure.

Retail prices for the new drives have yet to be announced.