Seagate, a major manufacturer of SCSI disk drives has introduced two 10,000 rpm disk drives: a 4.5 GB drive and a 9.0 GB drive. The line has been named "Cheetah." Each rotates approximately 40 percent faster than the 7,200 rpm drives now in widespread use. The faster speed means that latency is much improved from an average of 4.2 ms to 2.99 ins. Latency is the average time to access the next data called for. The new drives also have an outstanding MTBF (mean time between failures) one million hours (114 years)
Other manufacturers are expected to introduce 10,000 rpm drives. When they do, it is likely that prices-which have not yet been announced-will drop and vendors of automated library systems will begin to incorporate them into their systems. The benefit will be even faster response times.
