Home Seagate’s Savvio 2.5″ SCSI hard drive
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Seagate’s Savvio 2.5″ SCSI hard drive

Geoff Gasior
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Manufacturer Seagate
Model Savvio
Price (street) $447 (36GB)
$838 (73GB)
Availability Now

IN THE STORAGE WORLD, the notion that smaller could be better seems a little odd. After all, hard drive manufacturers have made a habit of pushing “bigger” hard drives that offer ever greater storage capacities. But hard drive size doesn’t always refer to storage capacity. When it comes to physical size, smaller can definitely be advantageous for high-density rackmount raid servers, blade storage, and even small form factor and mobile workstations. Of course, size isn’t everything for those applications. Performance is always important.

In a bid to shrink proportions without sacrificing speed, Seagate has introduced the Savvio line of 2.5″ SCSI hard drives. These diminutive drives are not only 70% smaller than 3.5″ drives, they also spin at 10K-RPM and boast lower seek times than their full-size counterparts. Seagate also claims that the Savvio family consumes less power and makes less noise than other SCSI drives.

As a small form factor enthusiast with a soft spot for SCSI, I couldn’t let Savvio go unscrutinized. I’ve run one of these tiny drives through our usual gauntlet of storage tests against five full-size 10K-RPM alternatives. The results are both surprising and inspiring. Read on to see how well the Savvio stacks up.


Those aren’t novelty cards

Meet mini me
To put the Savvio into context, let’s start with a look at how the drive’s specs compare with Seagate’s 3.5″ Cheetah 10k.6 SCSI drive.

  Savvio Cheetah 10K.6
Maximum internal transfer rate 752Mbits/sec 841Mbits/sec
Maximum external transfer rate 320MB/sec
Average sustained transfer rate 52MB/s 59.9MB/s
Average seek time (read) 4.1ms 4.7ms
Average seek time (write) 4.5ms 5.3ms
Average rotational latency 3ms 2.99ms
Spindle speed 10,000-RPM
Cache size 8MB
Platter capacity 37GB
Available capacities 37, 73GB 37, 73, 147GB
MTBF 1,400,000 hours 1,200,000 hours
Warranty length Five years
Dimensions 15 x 70.1 x 111.7 mm 25.4 x 101.6 x 146.05 mm
Weight 0.5lbs 1.62lbs

Right off the bat, there’s evidence that the Savvio might not be quite as fast as Seagate’s full-size 10K-RPM SCSI drive. The Savvio’s maximum internal and average sustained transfer rates are slower than the Cheetah 10K.6 by more than 10%. However, the Savvio boasts quicker seek times that could help balance things out. On paper, the Cheetah has an edge when it comes to lengthy, sustained transfers, but the Savvio looks better suited to workloads with more random access patterns.

While its transfer rate and seek time specs differ from the Cheetah, the Savvio shares its big brother’s 10K-RPM spindle speed, 8MB cache, and 37GB platter capacity. The Savvio is only available in 37 and 73GB capacities, though. With Cheetahs available up to 147GB and new 10K-RPM SCSI drives from Maxtor and Hitachi Global Storage pushing 300GB, the Savvio has a definite disadvantage in storage capacity per drive.


Savvio’s barely longer than 3.5″ drives are wide

Savvio drives are a little less than 70% smaller than 3.5″ disks by volume and less than a third of their weight. To put that in perspective, a single Savvio is roughly the size of a deck of cards—you need three Savvios to approach the volume of one 3.5″ hard drive.

In certain RAID configurations, the Savvio’s smaller stature can also make up for its limited single-drive storage capacity. Take RAID, for example. A minimum of two drives are required for RAID 1, three drives for RAID 5, and four drives for RAID 0+1 or 10. With Savvios taking up less space, it’s easier to squeeze multi-drive arrays into small enclosures. Heck, a three-drive Savvio RAID 5 array takes up roughly the same volume as a single 3.5″ hard disk.

Apart from its RAID-specific benefits, the Savvio’s smaller form factor also contributes to lower power consumption. The drive’s lighter platters require less energy to spin, allowing Seagate to use a much smaller motor than on 3.5″ drives. Seagate claims Savvio consumes 44% less power than a typical 3.5″ 10K-RPM SCSI drive under load. For large datacenters with rack upon rack of storage, lower power consumption could translate to a significant savings over time. Lower power consumption also gives the Savvio less potential to radiate heat, although any heat it does radiate will be concentrated over a smaller surface area.

 

Potential applications
The Savvio’s unique blend of proportion and performance potential makes it ideal for a number of applications, most notably high-density RAID storage. Seagate points to an example where a 3U rack-mount unit with 14 3.5″ 147GB SCSI drives can be replaced by a 2U unit with 30 Savvios. Storage capacity is comparable between the two, and thanks to Savvio’s lower per-drive wattage requirements, power consumption is about the same. This example doesn’t take into account the existence of 300GB 3.5″ SCSI drives, but saving 1U of rack space is still nothing to sneeze at.

Massive 2U arrays are probably the most appropriate Savvio application, but I’m almost more interested in what Savvio can bring to the 1U server space. 1U enclosures can generally accommodate four 3.5″ hard drives, but it’s a tight squeeze. With Savvio, enclosures should be able to handle more drives with improved air flow to aid cooling. With room for a greater number of drives, mixing multiple RAID arrays should be easier, as well. Savvio also has potential for the blade market where it would replace much slower notebook drives.

Speaking of notebook drives, there are a couple of intriguing niche markets that could benefit from a little Savvio as well. High-performance desktop replacement laptops and mobile workstations immediately come to mind. Both are stuck with relatively slow 7,200RPM ATA drives, so 10K-RPM SCSI would be a big upgrade. It certainly seems reasonable that a company like Alienware could squeeze a couple of Savvios into a desktop replacement chassis, perhaps even with RAID. Dell’s Precision mobile workstation line could also benefit from a faster Savvio storage subsystem.


Three Savvios in a Shuttle XPC’s hard drive bay with loads of room to spare

As a small form factor enthusiast, I can’t help but gush over the Savvio’s potential for toaster-sized workstations, too. Iwill’s dual Opteron cube would be perfect for a couple of Savvios in RAID. Not only would the drives take up less space inside the case, their lower power requirements would also be easier on the system’s power supply. I’d imagine that a couple of Savvios would run much cooler within the cramped confines of a small form factor enclosure than would a pair of 3.5″ drives, too.

With a Serial Attached SCSI flavor on the way, Savvio will only become more suitable for high volume and small form factor applications. Of course, the drive has to hold up its end of the performance bargain, which brings us to our punishing gauntlet of benchmarks. But before we get into that, here are a few more nudies of the drive to drool over.


Savvio from above


And below


The drive’s 80-pin SCA-2 connector
 

Our testing methods
All tests were run three times, and their results were averaged, using the following test systems.

Processor AMD Opteron 246 2.0GHz (1 processor)
Front-side bus HT 16-bit/800MHz downstream
HT 16-bit/800MHz upstream
Motherboard Tyan Thunder K8W
North bridge AMD-8151 AGP tunnel
AMD-8131 PCI-X tunnel
South bridge AMD-8111 I/O hub
Chipset drivers AMD chipset driver pack 2.10
Memory size 1GB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type Corsair CM72SD512RLP-3200/S Registered PC3200 DDR SDRAM
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200
Graphics driver ForceWare 61.76
Storage Controllers

Adaptec 29320-R

LSI 21320

SIIG Serial ATA PCI

Storage Driver

Adaptec 3.00S4

LSI 1.10.02

Silicon Image 1.0.0.44

Storage

Maxtor Atlas 10K IV 147GB
Maxtor Atlas 10K V 300GB
Seagate Cheetah 10K.6 147GB
Seagate Savvio 37GB

Seagate Cheetah 10K.6 147GB
Seagate Savvio 37GB

Western Digital Raptor WD360GD 37GB
Western Digital Raptor WD740GD 74GB

Operating System Windows XP Professional SP2 with DirectX 9.0c

Since the Savvio is the world’s only 2.5″ SCSI drive, it doesn’t really have any direct competition. To see how its performance stacks up against 3.5″ drives, I’ve assembled a collection of 10K-RPM SCSI and Serial ATA alternatives. To make the graphs clearer, I’ve left out Maxtor and Seagate’s 15K-RPM drives. You can check out how their performance compares in our review of Maxtor’s Atlas 10K V.

When I first started testing the Savvio, I noticed that the drive’s performance was significantly lower than expected on our Adaptec 29320-R SCSI adapter. LSI was kind enough to hook me up with its 21320 controller, which improved the Savvio’s performance dramatically, suggesting that initial performance problems are related to the Adaptec card. I’ve provided Savvio performance scores with both the Adaptec and LSI cards to show the difference between them. I also tested the Cheetah 10K.6 on the LSI card to directly compare with the Savvio results.

The Serial ATA and SCSI cards were used in different PCI-X slots on different PCI-X busses. Each card had an entire PCI-X bus to itself, so bandwidth sharing shouldn’t be an issue.

A special thanks goes out to the Computer Repair Shop and KickAss Gear for kicking in the Western Digital Raptor WD360GD and WD740GD drives we used for testing.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

The test systems’ Windows desktop was set at 1280×1024 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests. All of the 3D gaming tests used the high detail image quality settings.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.

 

HD Tach
We tested HD Tach 3.01 with the benchmark’s full variable zone size setting.

Given the Savvio’s lower sustained and average transfer rate specs, it’s no surprise that the drive’s average read and write scores are lower than the 10K-RPM SCSI competition. The Savvio does manage to edge out one of the Raptors, though.

When it comes to burst speeds, the Savvio can definitely be competitive, at least with the Adaptec card.

Random access time is the Savvio’s real strong suit. With the LSI card, the Savvio is nearly a millisecond quicker than the Cheetah 10K.6. However, with the Adaptec card, it’s more than a millisecond and a half slower.

HD Tach’s CPU utilization margin for error is +/- 2%, so the Savvio doesn’t really distinguish itself from the competition here.

 

IOMeter – Transaction rate

The Savvio has some definite performance problems on the Adaptec card, but with the LSI, it’s largely as fast as the Cheetah 10K.6. The Savvio’s performance is actually a little slower than the Cheetah with lower workloads. We have to really start hammering the drive in order to fully unlock its potential.

 

IOMeter – Response time

The Savvio’s performance tracks well with the Cheetah 10K.6 when it comes to IOMeter response times, at least on the LSI card. Savvio performance on the Adaptec card is much lower not only in absolute terms, but also compared with the Cheetah on the same card.

 

IOMeter – CPU utilization

IOMeter CPU utilization tests don’t show the Savvio in a better or worse position than the competition.

 

ATTO
ATTO tests read and write performance with various transfer sizes. We tested the drives with 1MB transfers that are well within their caches and with 32MB transfers that are not.

The Savvio’s 1MB ATTO transfer rates don’t seem to depend on which SCSI card we use—write performance is comparatively lower with both while read performance spikes pretty high. The Adaptec card seems to have an edge when it comes to larger transfer sizes for 1MB reads.

Moving to 32MB transfers, the Savvio’s write speeds are right in the thick of things. Read speeds are a little slower than the SCSI competition, though.

 

File Copy Test
File Copy Test is a pseudo-real-world benchmark that times how long it takes to create, read, and copy files in various test patterns. File copying is tested twice: once with the source and target on the same partition, and once with the target on a separate partition. Scores are presented in MB/sec.

WRITE_THROUGH keeps all of our SCSI drives, including the Savvio, from even beginning to compete with the Raptors in FC-Test’s file creation tests. Savvio file creation’s a little quicker on the Adaptec card than on the LSI, but both are quite competitive with the Cheetah 10K.6. (For an explanation of what WRITE_THROUGH is and why we don’t disable it on SCSI drives, see this page of our 10K-RPM SCSI hard drive comparison.)

The Savvio suffers a little in FC-Test’s read speed tests and is slower than most of our 10K-RPM SCSI drives.

The Savvio fares a little better in the copy tests, but not by much. Here, the LSI card seems to have the advantage, but the Cheetah’s usually at least a little faster.

Results are similar in the partition copy tests. The Savvio isn’t quite as fast as the Cheetah, but it’s not much slower, either.

 

Business and Content Creation Winstone

The Winstone tests are no favorite of the Savvio, which is at the back on both SCSI cards. The performance gap isn’t huge, but it’s consistent.

DivX encoding

DivX encoding doesn’t seem to be demanding enough for any drive to emerge as a clear victor. However, Savvio performance on the Adaptec card is noticeably slower than with the LSI card or other drives.

picCOLOR image processing
Dr. Reinert H. G. Mueller has a hard drive benchmark built into his picCOLOR image analysis tool. The disk benchmark writes the contents of a 16MB test pattern buffer eight times to create a 128MB file on the disk. Performance is measured in MB/sec.

picCOLOR’s hard disk benchmark shows the Savvio comfortably wedged between two Cheetah scores. The drive doesn’t have the transfer rates to compete with the faster Maxtor 10K-RPM drives, though.

 

Boot time
To give you an idea of how much—or how little—hard drives can affect boot and load times, I busted out my trusty stopwatch.

Savvio boot times are much quicker on the LSI card and pretty competitive overall.

Level load times are less impressive, though. The Savvio trails everyone in both DOOM 3 and Far Cry, not that you’ll be playing either from a 2U storage array.

 

Noise levels
Noise levels were measured with an Extech 407727 Digital Sound Level meter 1″ from the drives at idle and under an IOMeter file server test pattern load. Since sound is additive, I’ve subtracted the Benchmarking Sweatshop’s ambient noise levels to highlight differences between the drives.

The Savvio is remarkably quiet at both idle and under load.

Power consumption
Power consumption was measured for the entire system, sans monitor, at the outlet. I used the same idle and load environments as the noise level tests.

The drive’s power consumption is quite low, too. When compared with other 10K-RPM SCSI drives, our test system’s power consumption was at least 8W lower with Savvio under load. For single-drive implementations, the power savings is probably going to be insignificant over the lifetime of the drive. However, once you start putting multiple drives in RAID, the savings can really add up.

 

Conclusions
I was able to find 36 and 73GB Savvio drives for sale online for $447 and $838, respectively. That’s not cheap, even for SCSI. With Cheetah 10K.6 drives selling for under $150 for 36GB models and under $300 for 73GB, Savvios are definitely priced at a premium. But maybe it’s a fair premium. The Savvio is the only 2.5″ 10K-RPM SCSI drive around, and although you could almost buy three 3.5″ 10K-RPM SCSI drives for the cost of a single Savvio, the Savvio takes up less than one third the volume of a single 3.5″ SCSI disk.

For high-density RAID storage, stuffing 30 Savvios into a 2U server is a pricy proposition. However, the drives could pay for themselves over time with lower power consumption and lesser rack space requirements. With the Savvio scoring well against our 3.5″ 10K-RPM SCSI drives in IOMeter’s file, web, and database server workload tests, there’s no need to worry about performance, either. With a small footprint and great IOMeter performance, the drives look well-suited for RAID implementations in 1U servers, too. Already, a couple of manufacturers are offering 1U enclosures specifically designed to house eight and 10 Savvio drives.

While Seagate’s Savvio agenda is dominated by server applications, I can’t help but be inspired by the drive’s potential for mobile and small form factor applications. The drive’s raw transfer rates and performance in desktop applications fall short of full-size 10K-RPM drives, but against 2.5″ laptop hard drives spinning at 7,200RPM and slower, I suspect the Savvio would clean up.

Although I’m quite impressed by the Savvio overall, our performance problems with the Adaptec 29320-R have me a little concerned. Even with the latest firmware and drivers, the Savvio’s IOMeter and random access time performance on the Adaptec controller leave much to be desired. Since the Savvio is still a very new drive and Seagate’s engineering teams are constantly in contact with Adaptec and other SCSI card manufacturers, it’s likely the performance issues can be resolved with a driver or firmware update. Still, it would be nice if Seagate provided a list of approved SCSI controllers that have been verified to fully exploit the Savvio’s performance potential.

Odd performance optimization issues aside, Seagate has definitely pulled off something special with the Savvio. They’ve managed to shrink a 10K-RPM SCSI drive’s proportions dramatically without sacrificing performance where it matters most. 

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