Storage vendor Seagate on Tuesday officially announced that it has proceeded with shipping high-capacity 2.5-inch hard drives that are the first to feature 2 million hours mean time between failure reliability.

Seagate's new Savvio 10K. 4 hard drives is reported to be launched in 600GB and 450GB memory capacity, which is twice the capacity of Seagate's previous 10,000-rpm hard drives. In addition, it also possesses twice the capacity of similar drives from competing vendors, said Teresa Worth, senior product marketing manager for the company.

The device is an enterprise drive for storage arrays that possess a 6Gbit/s SAS interface, with dual-port communication and a 4GBit/s Fibre Channel one as well.

The new drive promises robust reliability acclaiming 2m hours MTBF compared to the 10K. 3's 1.6m hours, a 25 per cent improvement. The annualized failure rate is 0.44 per cent, compared to the previous 0.55 per cent.

Moreover, its drives are based on power management technology that reduces power use by nearly 60 percent compared to 15,000-rpm, 3.5-inch hard drives.

The new drives are reported to ship this week as per the schedule, and can be ordered in either 6-Gbps SAS or 4-Gbps Fibre Channel interfaces.