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Seagate first with 1.5TB hard drives

by Parm Mann on 11 July 2008, 10:45

Tags: Seagate Hard Drives , Seagate (NASDAQ:STX)

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Austin Modine of The Register reports:

Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 will use four platters to cram the scale-tipping new raw capacity into an eleventh generation of its flagship drive. The storage firm points out its the single largest hard drive capacity bump in the last 50 years.

As the name suggests, the HDD spins at 7,200RPM. The 3Gb/s SATA I interface has a sustained data rate of up to 120MB/s.

The disks are also sold in 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB, and 160GB varieties with cache options of 32MB and 16MB.

Yesterday, Hitachi rolled out its second generation of 1TB hard drives, using three platters of 375GB each. A bit of basic arithmetic then suggests both Hitachi and Seagate are dealing with platters of roughly the same density.

Hard drive manufacturers absolutely adore keeping pricing details mum until zero hour, and this case is no different. Expect some damage to the billfold, but the upshot is the price of 1TB HDDs may drop as a result.

Seagate also announced a new pair of 500GB hard drives for notebooks. The 2.5-inch Momentus drives will be offered in 5,400RPM and 7,200RPM variations, with 8MB of cache and 16MB of cache respectively.

The drives are offered with a free-fall sensor technology that helps prevent damage when dropped. According to Seagate, the sensor detects any changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity and parks the heads off the disk to prevent contact with the platter in a free fall of as little as 8 inches and within 3/10ths of a second.

Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 hard drives will begin shipping in the fourth quarter of 2008.



HEXUS Forums :: 17 Comments

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Damn just got another 3x1tb :(

So the platter density is 375gb now… These must be pretty fast
Good, good. Looking forward to WD releasing one of those black power 1.5TB drives so their fast 1TB drives drop below Ā£100
Who cares about 1-2W of power consumtion on an HDD when you've got a CPU using anything from 25-100w and a GFX card using anything from 50-150 at idle!
excellent! im running out of drive bays!
1.5TB is a lot to lose in one go if you ask me.
Jay
1.5TB is a lot to lose in one go if you ask me.
I agree, I used to use 2x 320GB drives but if one died (which at one time one did) I lost a lot of things but it wasn't as bad as loosing 750GB or more. Currently I'm running 2x 750GB F1's in a mirror array mostly for that reason, loosing 750GB of stuff would be really nasty, 1.5TB would be /slitwrists.