It is amazing how we progress in to the technological field. Just 60 years ago we were looking at methods to store information on to physical media. Who thought that this could be possible? Now we are no longer seeking methods of storing data but rather speed and performance. No mater what the media is we always looking to make things faster and more reliable and secure. Today we are going to be taking a look at the newest member of Cheetah Hard Drives from Seagate. Just by hearing the name of the product you would imagine it being extremely fast, and believe me it is. Let us take a closer look at Cheetah as it promises to provide a long lasting performance at extreme speeds.

About the Product

Following information is taken from the Seagate website.

Seagate Cheetah 15K drives offer the high performance, increased capacity and optimized power consumption needed by enterprises to meet demanding Tier 1 enterprise requirements.

Key Features and Benefits:

• Delivers high performance with sustained data rates up to 171MB/s*
• Offers high capacity (up to 600GB) with third-generation perpendicular recording*
• Includes Seagate PowerTrim™ technology to dynamically reduce power usage*
• Supports 6Gb/s SAS 2.0, 4Gb/s FC, and Ultra320 SCSI interfaces*
• Includes advanced read/write technology for an unrecoverable error rate of 1x10E16 and an annualized failure rate (AFR) of 0.55 percent
• Provides TCG-compliant, Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) security option (SAS models only) to eliminate the need to overwrite or physically destroy drives, enable safe return of drives for warranty or expired lease purposes and allow organizations to securely repurpose or sell hard drives*
• Meets regulatory data security compliance requirements and is FIPS 140-2 Validated™ to protect Sensitive but Unclassified and Protected class data*

FIPS 140-2 Inside

Specifications

Now that we got basic information out of the way, lets take a closer look at Cheetah.

Closer look

Front and Back Shot		Seagate Cheetah 15k.7

Let me start by thanking Seagate for providing UMLan with these samples. Cheetah hard drives specifically designed for industrial use and not for home use. Sure you can use Cheetah drives for gaming and storage but it would a pricey investment. What we are looking at here is a SAS 2.0 15k.7 hard drives which are designed to be used in a server based environments. These particular drives are equipped with latest 6Gb/s SAS chip set and could be with any 6Gb/p interfaces such as LSI or HP. The top speeds of these drives is up 171 MB/s.

Backplane		SAS connector

Besides the high performance speed Cheetah 15.7k comes with build in Self Encrypting mechanism (SED). This feature is available to selected Cheetah models only. So as data been written to the drive, it is being encrypted. So no longer IT professionals need to worry about destroying data on the drive once a user leaves company. These particular drives also are FIPS 140-2 (Federal Information Processing Standard) compliant. The level 2 of the FIPS 140 states (Security Level 2 improves upon the physical security mechanisms of a Security Level 1 cryptographic module by requiring features that show evidence of tampering, including tamper-evident coatings or seals that must be broken to attain physical access to the plaintext cryptographic keys and critical security parameters (CSPs) within the module, or pick-resistant locks on covers or doors to protect against unauthorized physical access.). This standard is widely used by US government as you would need to be compliant with 140-2 for most of the applications. So you are looking to have these guy in you NAS or SAN Arrays, you would be making a right choice.

LSI MegaRAID SAS 9240-4i		Out of the box

For our testing purposes we are going to be using a MegaRAID PCIx adapter by LSI. LSI is a world famous manufacturer of RAID controllers. This particular model (SAS 9240-4i) is going to help us to test performance and speed of Cheetah as it supports multiple RAID configurations and 6GB/s SAS connection.

Perfect Combination		Lets Go!

The choice of server for benchmarking is Dell Power Edge 850. Since we have only two hard drives there isn't much we can do to these them but only run then in RAID 1 mode. If we had 5 or 10 of these, we could of put them in the NAS and benchmark them that way. But this will be just fine as we are going to be get some basic reading data of these drives and hopefully that will give us a common understanding on what to expect in the production environments.

Now that we have gotten the pictorial out of the way, lets take a look at some test data.

Testing

As we mentioned earlier, we are going to be using Dell Power Edge 850 with LSI MegaRAID SAS 9240-4i. The server will be loaded with Win 2k8 R2 operating system and the choices of benchmark software we picked HD Tune Pro 4.01 and HD Tach 3.0.4.0. These particular applications has been rather accurate for us in the past so they should be able to serve us well this time around.

HD Tune Pro Benchmark

First we took a look at the over all benchmark by HD Tune Pro. What we have learned is that the have achieved a burst rate of 194 MB/s. Rather astonishing result for a physical drive. If this was a SSD drive then I wouldn't be as surprised of the burst rate. The minimum read speed achieved was 122.2 MB/s and the maximum read speed was reached at 193.7 MB/s. If you look at the speed of 6GB/s controller and the burst rate of Cheetah, it is clear to see that we are just about hitting the tresh hold of the controller which is always a good thing. The access time was rather low as well, 4.7 ms. Since these drives spinning at 15.7k RPM I am not surprised a bit of low access time.

HD Tune Pro File Benchmark

The file benchmark showed us that small files takes very quickly to read and write. The drives doesn't even rev up properly to get an accurate reading. Medium size files gave us much better numbers and we established that the range of read is between 175 and 185 MB/s and write speed of between 40 and 70 MB/s. As we look at the larger file size we can see that it the reading speed from 225 to 255 MB/s. The writing speed we found to be stabilized at about 190 MB/s.

HD Tune Pro Random Access

Random access benchmark showed us that on smaller request sectors we are looking for 203 iops with 4.9 ms of average access time. Just what we saw in the previous benchmark. The random access was about 2x slower. As we see from the benchmark above we have 125 iops and 8.0 ms.

HD Tune Pro Extra Tests

Just being interested in additional data, we have performed HD Tune Pro Extra Tests. As you can see the numbers are rather impressive and Cheetahs definitely stands out as a quick performance drives.

HD Tach 8 Mb vs 32 Mb SATA

HD Tach showed us a little bit different data but yet impressive. The random access time was still at 4.9 ms and average read speed of 170 MB/s was achieved. The burst speed with HD Tach was much higher than with HD Tune Pro. We have achieved burst speeds of 251.3 MB/s as oppose to 194 MB/s.

Conclusion

Judging by what we saw in our review the overall performance and features of Cheetah 15k.7 is nothing less of remarkable. There are few factors that we need to keep in mind while handling Cheetah. One of the very important factors I would like to mention is temperature of these drives. While spinning 15k RPM these drives produce an incredible amount of heat. I am not too sure if this is unavoidable with the high level enterprise components but keeping in mind that these drive spin rather fast is no brainier. Since these guys are not SSD drives, the temperature needs to be controlled by a good cooling. Most of the server enclosures do provide adequate amount of cooling for the hard drive so I wouldn't be worried too much about this.

The reliability of Cheetah is rather impressive as well as the annual failure rate. We are looking at about 182 years before failure and 0.55% annual rate failure. This is a definitely a handy number to throw in front of your CIO to show him/her that the hard drive configuration is bullet proof. But wait that is not all the good news you could bring. Cheetah 15k.7 also FIPS 140-2 compliant. So if you work for government or for organization that deals with government and require FIPS 140 compliance, these drives are your best choice.

One thing that these drives have that could be very beneficial to an IT professional is Self Encryption. The SED (Self Encrypting Drive) technology provides that extra layer of security for your data and makes it easier to manage hard drives when they need to be returned or recycled. This feature is available only on selected drives of Cheetah. I hate the fact that when I need to recycle a hard drive, I need to format it at least 3 passes to make it a proper data destruction. With these drives you will no longer need to do that. If you are interested on how the self encryption drives work, please check the following pdf file. Self Encrypting Drives

Performance of Cheetah 15k.7 was impressive as well. In fact is was expected. Using LSI MegaRAID 6Gbps controller really did gave as a good understanding on what we should expect from these drives in the production. We all want best performance out of equipment and therefore always look seek best optional solutions. When you are utilizing a 90% of your controller speed, which in our case is 6Gbps, it makes us smile.

Our over all experience with Cheetah 15k.7 SAS 6Gbps drives was a pleasant one as I would strongly recommend to look in to these hard drives if you are in the market for some performance gear. The hard drives are not cheap as they sell for about 450$USD (at the time of the review) but in comparison to some of the other tier 1 hard drives, Cheetahs are very much reasonably priced. It gives me a great pleasure to award Cheetah 15k.7 SAS with 10/10 as we found no complaints about these units.

Some pros we found:

FIPS 140-2 compliant.

Self Encryption technology (Available onl selected models only).

Fast 6gbps SAS performance.

Outstanding reliability and failure rate.

Some cons we found:

Temperature levels could be a bit lower.