O'Grady's PowerPage

Tag: Seagate

  • Seagate surpasses 1 terabyte per platter marker, new hard drives en route

    seagate-logo

    This could lead to something nifty.

    Per Macworld, hard drive manufacturer Seagate on Tuesday unveiled the first 3.5-inch hard drive featuring 1TB of storage capacity per disk platter, breaking a previous area density benchmark.

    Seagate plans to begin shipping the technology with its flagship Barracuda desktop hard drive through its distribution channel in mid-2011. The drive will also be available in 3TB, 2TB, 1.5TB and 1TB capacities.

    Rocky Pimentel, Seagate’s executive vice president of worldwide sales and marketing, said the drive will go a long way in addressing customer data growth, allowing customers to store more in a smaller footprint.

    The GoFlex drives include an NTFS driver, which makes the GoFlex drives compatible with Windows and Mac OS X without the need for reformatting. The GoFlex Desk external drive’s sleek black 3.5-inch design sits either vertically or horizontally to accommodate any desktop environment.

    Seagate did not disclose final pricing for the new drives.

    Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.

    Also, the ladies love 3 terabyte hard drives.

    Just ask them.

  • MyService offering 750GB upgrade service for current MacBook, MacBook Pro notebooks

    This could be useful.

    Per MacMegasite, MyService has released a new 750GB 7200rpm hard drive upgrade for the MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks. These new 2.5″ Momentus drives by Seagate are the largest 7200rpm hard drives available for the MacBook and the complete upgrade service is US$299, the price encapsulating the new 750GB drive, round trip shipping, professional installation and data transfer.

    Your old hard drive is returned to you and can be used for backups. Since MyService is an Apple Authorized Service Provider, the 750GB upgrade will not void your Apple warranty.

    Once your laptop is back at MyService, a certified technician installs the new drive and transfers the data over from your old drive. All drives feature a 3 year manufacturer warranty. After the service is completed, your notebook is cleaned, tested and sent back to you, along with your old drive. All services are completed within 24 hours of arrival.

  • Hitachi announces Z5K500 500GB notebook hard drive

    Electronics giant Hitachi has announced the industry’s highest density, single-platter hard disk drive that has an areal density of 636Gbit/inch, almost 100Gbit per square inch more than its closest competitor.

    Per Macworld, Hitachi’s 2.5″ in 5400-rpm Travelstar Z5K500 laptop drive is only 7mm in height. The drive is the industry’s highest capacity, single-platter hard disk drive. The Travelstar Z5K500, which comes in 500GB, 320GB and 250GB capacities, is the second second generation of Hitachi products to use the company’s Advanced Format drive, which increases the physical sector size on drives from 512 bytes to 4096 (4K) bytes, thereby improving drive capacity and error correction capabilities.

    Western Digital was first to the table with a 1TB laptop drive last year. That Scorpio Blue drive, however, contained three 333GB capacity platters and measured 12.5mm in height. Seagate and Toshiba then followed with their own three-platter, 12.5mm 1TB laptop drives, along with two-platter 750GB 9.5mm-high drives.

    Hitachi said its new drive surpasses per-gigabyte cost advantages that other 2.5″ and 1.8″ drives had offered. Of course, it also exceeds the price per gigabyte when compared to solid-state drives, as well.

    Hitachi’s new Travelstar Z5K500 drives have 8MB cache and a Serial ATA (SATA) 3Gbit/sec interface.

    The drives are aimed at system manufacturers who can use the thinner drives to differentiate product lines by utilizing space savings to produce thinner devices, add battery capacity, increase shock robustness, or improve internal airflow.

    The Travelstar Z-series of drives also offer an optional bulk data encryption feature, which allows the drives to be set to encrypt all data stored on them. The drives are expected to ship to distributors this month.

    Hitachi said pricing for the new drive models has not been finalized.

  • Seagate announces one terabyte 2.5″ notebook hard drive

    Hard drive manufacturer Seagate on Monday announced the industry’s first 2.5″ enterprise-class drive with one terabyte of capacity, or about 60% more could be stored previously.

    Per Macworld, the next generation Constellation hard drive allows a standard 2U (3.5-in high) storage array to store up to 24TB, and a full server rack to store up to 500TB.

    Seagate’s new drive spins at 7200 rpm, contains four 250GB platters, and has 6Gbit/sec throughput. Like the first generation of the Constellation, the second generation comes with serial SCSI (SAS) connectivity. The updated offering also offers serial ATA (SATA).

    “We’re comparing this model to a 10,000-rpm drive in the enterprise, which today has a maximum capacity of 600GB,” said Barbara Craig, Seagate’s senior product marketing manager. “Its performance is about three times that of notebook drive and it’s twice as reliable.”

    The SAS model of the Constellation.2 is dual ported for resiliency and sports sequential and random read speeds of up to 115MB/sec; the SATA model has 115MB/sec sequential read speeds but boasts 180MB/sec for random reads. Not only did Seagate double the maximum capacity of the Constellation, but it also increased the entry-level drive capacity from 160GB to 250GB.

    The Constellation lags behind Seagate’s 1TB, 3.5″ enterprise-class drive in sequential performance, but blows by it in random reads. The random performance is better on 2.5″ drives because of their smaller disks and denser data.

    Sequential Performance (MB/S) is better on 3.5″ drives because of the larger disk capacity and the higher areal density of the drive, Seagate said.

    Regardless of the performance in comparison to its 3.5″ drive, Seagate pointed out that its new 2.5″ drive offers far greater space and power savings over its larger cousin. For example, the Constellation.2 offers 72 percent power savings while idle over the 3.5-in drive, or 3.85 watts versus 8 watts while idle, the company added.

    Like its predecessor, the Constellation.2 is a self-encrypting drive. The latest model offers an encryption algorithm from AES 128-bit to AES 256-bit.

    Sometime next quarter, Seagate is set to announce a Constellation.2 drive that has passed the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and is sealed with a tamper-resistant label.

    The estimated mean time between failures (MTBF) was also increased with this drive from 1.2 million hours with the previous generation to 1.4 million hours, according to Craig. The Constellation.2 has twice the lifespan of Seagate’s 2.5-in laptop drive, the Momentus.

    Final pricing and availability have yet to be announced for the Constellation.

  • Seagate Releases 7 Millimeter Notebook Hard Drive

    seagate-logo

    If you can fit more data onto a notebook hard drive, more power to you. Per PC World, hard drive manufacturer Seagate seems ready to launch a 7 millimeter high notebook drive as part of its Momentus lineup this January at CES.

    Although Seagate has yet to release specifics, it’s thought that the drive will be spinning a single platter. Given that dual-platter 2.5″ disks currently max out at 640GB (or 320GB per platter), Seagate is expected to at least match this or even demonstrate an improvement in the amount of data that can be placed on each platter.

    It’s anyone’s guess, but it’s cool stuff and we’ll be following this up until its release.