Seagate bumps Barracuda range to one terabyte

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 26 June 2007 13:07

Business IT - Technology

Seagate has announced new members of its Barracuda hard drive family that squeeze 1T of data onto four platters using perpendicular recording.

Two models have been announced so far.

The Barracuda ES.2 is intended for enterprise applications including networked storage, disk-to-disk backup, and rich media content storage. It is designed for 24x7 use with a mean time between failures of 1.2 million hours.

Other features likely to appeal to the market include sustained performance even in densely-packed systems thanks to Seagate's 'Rotational Vibration Feed Forward' system, energy efficiency (the company claims a 55 percent reduction in watts per gigabyte), and the choice of SATA or SAS interfaces.

The Barracuda 7200.11 is the desktop equivalent. Like the ES.2, it is a 7200rpm drive with an 8.5ms average seek time, but it is claimed to be one of the quietest disk drives available despite being suitable for high-performance and gaming PCs.

Volume shipments of the Barracuda ES.2 and 7200.11 will begin in the third quarter. The price of the Barracuda 7200.11 will be US$399.99.

Seagate plans to offer additional versions of the 1T Barracuda to suit the requirements of digital entertainment products (which will likely include whole-disk encryption to key the drive to the device as part of DRM measures) and for the security and surveillance markets. No timeframe has been revealed.

"The need for high-capacity storage in enterprise networks and home entertainment centers is almost insatiable," said John Monroe, a research vice president at Gartner. "Historians may consider the shipment of 1T drives as a watershed event for the industry but users will consider such devices commonplace. We believe 1T (and larger) drives will become 'standard equipment' in, on or near virtually every television set in the world as well as in a variety of multi-user environments."

Hitachi delivered its 1T drive earlier this year, using five platters compared with Seagate's four.