Seagate joins the terabyte disk club

June 25, 2007, 08:52 AM —  Techworld.com — 

Seagate is a launching a pair of 1TB capacity disks with advanced power-saving technology. This could save up to a quarter of the power consumed by normal drives. It has also announced a ruggedized 2.5-inch drive holding 80G bytes. Hitachi was first to market with a 1T byte drive a month or so ago.

The Barracuda 7200.11 is a 3.5-inch format drive, spinning at 7,200rpm and holds 500GB, 750GB or 1TB of data. Its sustained data rate of 105MB/s is the highest ever attained for a desktop drive and it is also the world's quietest desktop drive. Conceptually the 1TB drive is four 250GB platters using Seagate's 2nd generation perpendicular recording technology. The interface is serial ATA (SATA) II running at 3GB/s.

The Barracuda ES.2 is the enterprise version of the drive with improved mean time before failure of 1.2 million hours compared to the consumer version's 1 million hours. It has both SATA and SAS (serial attached SCSI) interfaces and comes in 250GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1TB configuration.

Seagate has added a power-saving technology, branded PowerTrim, to these drives. Their electronics are managed by new firmware and hardware that monitors what the drive is doing and switches off power to unused parts of the drive electronics. If the drive is reading then separate read electronics can be switched off. Ditto for the write electronics if the drive is reading data. If there is no data being transferred then the cache and memory can be switched off and/or refresh cycles delayed.

This micro-control of power within the drive yields an average power saving of about 25 percent over a drive without the technology. That translates into quite a substantial power saving in an array of such drives. It generates a 125GB/watt rating compared to the previous ES generation's 80GB/watt.

The drives come with either SATA (for consumers and enterprises) or SAS (for enterprises) interfaces and have an MFRP of US$399, which is the same as competitor Hitachi GST's 1TB drive.

Hitachi's 5-platter 1TB drive does not come with an SAS interface making it less attractive to enterprise customers.

Seagate has also announced the ES25.2, a hardened 80GB, 2.5-inch, SATA drive built to operate in rough environments with hostile temperature, vibration, humidity, shock and altitude conditions. It can withstand more vibration than any other stand-alone drive and comes with a 5-year warranty.

» posted by ITworld staff

Techworld.com

I like it!
Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Resources
White Paper

Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.

Webcast

Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.

White Paper

Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.

Free stuff

Crimeware: Understanding New Attacks and Defenses
By Markus Jakobsson, Zulfikar Ramzan
Published Apr 6, 2008 by Addison-Wesley Professional. Part of the Symantec Press series.
Enter now! | Official rules | Sample chapter

Securing VoIP Networks: Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Countermeasures
By Peter Thermos, Ari Takanen
Published Aug 1, 2007 by Addison-Wesley Professional.
Enter now! | Official rules | Sample chapter

Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

More Resources