Seagate to release its Terabyte drives

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Seagate Unleashes New Terabyte Drives

Need more storage?

Quote:
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.
Source: Seagate Unleashes New Terabyte Drives

BudDurland · Joined: Dec 05, 2002 Posts: 415

Mind boggling, considering what the 60 megabyte drives in some of the first servers I built in the 90's cost.

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Since my first 30 meg Seagate (ST4038) circa 1985, I've always thought I'd never fill up any HD I've owned. That 30 meg MFM drive was selling in the Computer Shopper for $799. Now look at what you can buy today for that same amount!

Shadow Cool

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The only reason we can't get by with a 30 meg drive any more is because the programmers will write programs to occupy whatever space is available.

Manufacturers are now building PC's with 120 gig hd's or more, so the programmers are going crazy writing HUGE programs that use up many megabytes of Hd space and require many megs of RAM to run them.

It's a vicious circle. Give the geeks (programmers) more space and they will write programs to fill that space.

It's nothing new......it started way before the PC was even invented.

I remember when I worked for NCR in the 60's and 70's.......we had the NCR 399 and 400 that had 4k of core memory. The programmers were going nuts trying to write programs that would run in that small amount of memory.

Ask a programmer today to write any program to run in just 4k of memory and he'll murder you. You'll never live to see another sun rise. Wink

Terra-byte drives? It's just a natural evolution of the PC. It had to come.
Just like we went from killobytes to megabytes and from megabytes to gigabytes.....now we go to terrabyte drives. Nothing to get excited about.....just normal evolution.

Cheers Mates!
Shadow Cool

pcrattail · Joined: Jun 11, 2004 Posts: 397

Yep, and as for myself.............
I will wait about 5 years.... for them to "prove themselves" reliable.
....... and for the prices to come down ..... LOL

Hey gotta figure .. the closer they pack that info..... the more chances of
data loss.

Same reason they went for OLDER chips in the space station.

The further away you are from a hunter........ the less likely you will
be killed by a "stray" bullet. LOL oh and don't dress up like a deer.

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Yeah, I loved it when the last major upgrade to Hubble, replaced a 386 with a 486. WOW, NASA is really up to "state of the art". Twisted Evil

Having a terrabyte of storage is easy, just get two 500 gig drives and you're THERE!

My webmaster has 1.3 terrabytes of storage in his web server.
Using multiple drives makes it easy and much cheaper too.

For some time now, Seagate has been using the new "Perpendicular Storage" technique, which allows for much greater bit density per platter.
I'm sure that's all we'll see from now on.
It also avails itself to the new SATA2 HD's.
I have several of them between my two computers and the data transfer rate is fantastic!
I won't play that stupid numbers game....I'll just say "Fantastic" and leave it at that.
I know I'm more than just happy with what I've got. Wink

Cheers Mates!
The Shadow Cool

goretsky

Hello,

Computer hardware and processors used in aerospace equipment, especially spacecraft and satellites, are typically ruggedized models with special packaging and connectors designed to resist cosmic radiation and to be far more reliable than the types of components you buy at a local electronics store. There are some exceptions to this, such as the ThinkPads used aboard the ISS, or the late-1970s/early-1980s-vintage processors used in the space shuttle's flight computer, but even devices like those typically have some modifications for power input, etc.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky