Seagate today announced its Cheetah 15K.5 hard drive, the first 3.5" hard disk based on perpendicular technology. The drive offers a 300 gigabytes capacity and promises 30% more performance. Perpendicular recording technology lets the Cheetah 15K.5 deliver twice the capacity of 15K drives currently available.

Perpendicular recording is perhaps the most significant near-term step in the evolution of hard drive technology. The method is similar to the longitudinal recording used in today's drives in that it relies on magnetically charged particles for data storage.

In today's drives, the north and south poles of the magnetic particles run parallel to the disc but in the new method they are arranged perpendicular to the disc, as the name suggests. The result of this new arrangement is that each particle occupies a smaller area of the disk's surface and so more particles can be crammed onto the disk. This is measured as the areal density.

Seagate is now shipping the Cheetah 15K.5 to leading OEM Customers. The Cheetah 15K.5 will be launched to the Distribution Channel later this quarter.

Its 15K RPM and fast seek times deliver the fastest time-to-data, resulting in 30 percent more I/O's-per-second and more than 20 percent faster response times than typical 3.5-inch 10K RPM drives, according to Seagate.

The Cheetah 15K.5 is available in a choice of 3 Gb/sec Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Ultra320 SCSI, and 4 Gb/sec Fibre Channel interfaces with capacities of 73, 147, and 300 gigabytes. It delivers a Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) reliability rating of 1.4 million hours at full duty cycle.