Seagate launched its Cheetah 15K.7 600 GB last July. It is now available in Japan against a little less than $820. It represents an important development in the field with its high and its interface SAS 6 Gb / s. However, hard drives with high rotational speeds and hence a high intake may be living on borrowed time.

Under the recent summit of the flash memory, Sun, a major player in the server world, held a conference on the relevance of SSD instead of the usual HDD to 15 000 revolutions per minute. The results are final, in terms of performance and consumption, Flash drives win hands down. There remains then only the "problem" of capacity.

The latter can be solved by mounting a storage cluster consists of high performance flash drives and conventional hard drives at 7,200 rpm. Then you win on all fronts, with faster performance, while consumption and overall costs are down. This example of the servers is also perfectly valid for conventional PCs, or a high performance SSD combined with a HDD 5400 rpm high capacity offers a good compromise.