Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 14 July 2008 20:24
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
Fancy a 1.5 terabyte 3.5-inch hard drive in your desktop, or a super
speedy 7200RPM 500GB 2.5-inch hard drive in your notebook? Seagate says
they’ve done it and they’re coming this year.
Wow... the last “big” hard disk technology used to be 1TB (terabyte) hard drives, but Seagate has blown past its previous achievement by going a half terabyte larger straight to 1.5TB instead.
This is in its “Barracuda” 7200RPM range, called the 7200.11, and these drives are due to start shipping in August.
Seagate characterises this as meeting the “explosive worldwide demand for digital-content storage in home and business environments,” and that’s true enough – you can never have enough storage space because you’ll always find a way to fill it up!
The 1.5TB drive is now the 11th generation of the Barracuda line, and Seagate says its “the single largest capacity hard drive jump in the more than half-century history of hard drives”, and it’s all thanks to “the capacity-boosting power of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology.”
The drive is expected to be used in “mainstream desktop computers, workstations, desktop RAID, gaming and high-end PCs, and USB/FireWire/eSATA external storage.”
It manages to fit 1.5TB onto four platters, has SATA 3Gb/sec and has “an industry-leading sustained data rate of up to 120MB/second for fast boot, application startup and file access.”
Aside from the flagship 1.5TB model, it also comes in the smaller sizes of 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB and 160GB with cache options of 32MB and 16MB.
So, what about the new notebook drives? Please read on to page 2.
