Seagate Intros New SATA Drives For Near-Line Apps

Aimed at storage applications where high capacity and low cost of storage are more important than performance, near-line storage devices are optimal for such applications as digital imaging and compliance archiving.

Pete Steege, senior product marketing for enterprise storage at Seagate, said the new drives contain a number of features that are suitable for enterprise near-line requirements.

For instance, the new SATA drives have a mean-time-before-failure rating of one million hours for near-line workload, which he said includes 24x7 operation and a high degree of random access of data.

The drives also have technology that actively monitors their use and heat levels to help prevent failures. "If they are used where they are not designed for, this technology will slow the drives down and start doing reads after writes to confirm the data is OK," he said.

Also new with the drives is error recovery control, which allows users to configure the amount of time a hard drive will use to recover from an error. The drives additionally have a one-step microcode download capability so that instead of powering down each drive individually for firmware updates, the entire array can be powered down and all the drives can be updated together, Steege said.