Seagate, Hitachi Up Storage Capacity With New Drives
Seagate on Thursday unveiled the Barracuda 7200.11, which at 1.5 Tbytes of raw capacity is the largest hard drive in terms of capacity in the market, said Joni Clark, product marketing manager for Seagate's personal compute business.
The new drives represent a 50-percent increase in capacity from the company's previous top-of-the-line PC drive, which had a capacity of 1 Tbyte, making this the highest one-time jump in drive capacity in the company's 50-plus year history, Clark said.
The jump in capacity comes as consumer users are experiencing a huge growth in terms of their digital data storage requirements, but even so may not satisfy all users, Clark said.
"For some people, a 1.5-Tbyte hard drive is the only hard drive they will ever need," she said. "But for others, it's just a stepping stone to higher capacities."
Seagate is targeting high-end and gaming PCs, workstations, desktop RAID appliances, and USB/FireWire/eSATA external storage devices with the new drives, Clark said. The company is also targeting mainstream users who are just starting to do more with such new technologies as video making.
The Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive packs 1.5 Tbytes on four platters, and includes a 3-Gbit-per-second SATA interface for a sustained data rate of up to 120 Mbytes per second. The platters spin at 7,200 rpm. The 3.5-inch drive is also offered in capacities of 1 Tbyte, 750 Gbytes, 640 Gbytes, 500 Gbytes, 320 Gbytes and 160 Gbytes, and offers 32-MByte and 16-MByte cache options.
The 1.5-Tbyte Barracuda 7200.11 is expected to ship in August with a list price of about $450, Clark said. It will be available through distribution first, and eventually through PC manufacturers once they get through the qualification process, she said.
Seagate on Thursday also introduced two new 2.5-inch, 500-Gbyte mobile PC hard drives.
The Momentus 5400.6 offers capacities ranging from 120GBytes to 500GBytes with an 8-MBytes cache, and its platters spin at 5,400 rpm. The Momentus 7200.4 has capacities ranging from 250GBytes to 500GBytes with a 16-MByte cache, and its platters spin at 7,200 rpm. Both feature a 3-Gbit-per-second SATA interface, and withstand up to 1,000 Gbits of non-operating shock and 350 Gbits of operating shock.
Clark said the new Momentus drives are expected to be available during the fourth quarter of the year, with initial interest expected to go to portable PC OEMs before trickling down to the distribution channel.
All the new Momentus and Barracuda drives come with a five-year warranty.
HGST on Thursday unveiled its second-generation desktop PC hard drive, the Deskstar 7K1000.B. Capacity of the new 3.5-inch, 7,200-rpm drives ranges from 160 Gbytes to 1 Tbyte.
The new three-platter drives feature up to 43-percent lower power consumption than its predecessors, HGST said. The drives also include the company's optional Bulk Data Encryption to help protect against data loss and piracy, the company said.
Also new from HGST is the Deskstar E7K1000, a hard drive aimed at business-critical storage systems applications. These drives include a 32-MByte buffer, a five-year warranty, 1.2-million-hour Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF), and HGST's Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology for increasing performance in multi-drive environments, the company said. It was designed for use in nearline storage arrays for archival and other high-density storage requirements, the company said.
The new Deskstar drives feature a 3-Gbit-per-second SATA interface, and are expected to ship in July.