Seagate Unleashes New Terabyte Drives

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Seagate Unleashes New Terabyte Drives

Barry Levine, newsfactor.comTue Jun 26, 12:01 PM ET

The terabyte drive has now become an active product category, with announcements this week by Seagate and last week by Samsung. The companies join Hitachi and Philips in setting a new goalpost for hard drive capacity.

Seagate announced two models, the Barracuda ES.2 for enterprise use and the Barracuda 7200.11 for consumer desktops. Both drives, set to ship in the third quarter, offer 7,200-rpm spin speeds, up to 32 MB of cache, average seek times of 8.5 milliseconds, and a reliability rating of 1.2 million hours mean time between failure (MTBF).

The Barracuda ES.2 has a serial attached SCSI (SAS) interface option along with SATA, and, according to Seagate, offers a 20 percent reduction in overall power consumption over earlier drives. Seagate noted the ES.2 boosts reliability with an industry-best unrecoverable error rate that is 10 times better than desktop-class drives.

$399 for a Terabyte

According to Seagate, the ES.2's applications for businesses include networked and tiered storage, disk-to-disk backup, archiving, and rich-media storage. The 7200.11, priced at $399.99, has a sustained data rate of 105 MB/sec, among the fastest for a desktop drive.

"We definitely have a race going on," said John Rydning, research manager for hard drives at IDC. Terabyte drives represent a "milestone in the evolution of hard disk drive technology," he added.

The new terabyte products have a couple of "subtle surprises," Rydning noted, such as the fact that Samsung is using three platters in its terabyte drives while Seagate is using four. "Samsung is pushing the areal density," he said, referring to how tightly data can be packed on a disk surface. "Historically, Seagate has been the leader."

An interesting aspect for businesses, he pointed out, is that the Seagate drive is being offered with a SAS interface as an option. "This is the first time that a high-capacity, 7,200-rpm drive has been offered with a native SAS," he said. Seagate said that SAS provides greater levels of reliability, data integrity, and performance.

Perpendicular Recording

Seagate's new terabyte drives use perpendicular recording, instead of longitudinal. Perpendicular recording enables magnetic charges to be stored vertically on a platter, providing a higher storage density.

Rydning said that, while perpendicular recording has been in commercial products for at least two years, it has primarily been used in mobile drives and is now moving into desktop and enterprise drives. He predicted that 60 percent to 65 percent of all hard disk drives will use perpendicular recording by 2008.

In a few years, industry observers might look at the terabyte milestone as we now look at the milestone of 1-GB drives. Reports are now indicating that Seagate's labs are working on drives that can store nearly 40 terabytes.

[computer2slow]

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