Fujitsu has announced that it will start shipping new 10K 147GB and 15K 73GB 2.5in serial attached SCSI (SAS) hard disk drives in the second and third quarter of this year respectively.

The small form factor (SFF) drives are designed to provide the high performance, reliability and dense data storage capacity needed to host mission critical, processing intensive applications in enterprise data centre servers and RAID arrays, but they may come at a price.

The manufacturer did not reveal pricing information, but Matthew Beavis of Fujitsu Europe’s storage division said it had been slow to introduce 2.5in 15K SAS drives because of the high costs associated with them. Rival manufacturer Seagate started shipping its 2.5in 15K Savvio SAS drives in January this year.

“The biggest challenge for the channel serving businesses looking for 2.5in drives is the switch from 10K SCSI to 15K SAS – it is a technology change and a price premium to go with it,” said Beavis.

Fujitsu will also ship a 15K 300GB 3.5in drive that can be fitted with either a SAS or Fibre Channel (FC) interface in the second quarter, plus a 120GB 2.5in SATA drive aimed blade servers and industrial PCs in the third quarter.