Seagate Cracks 1TB

June 27, 2007: It was just a matter of time until it happened, but Seagate has cracked the 1 terabyte mark with its range of Barracuda hard disks.

Seagate says its Barracuda ES.2 has been designed for demanding business-critical and nearline enterprise storage environments, including networked and tiered storage solutions, reference/compliance storage, disc-to-disc backup and restore, archiving solutions, rich media content storage and collaboration.

It claims the drive is the industry's only second-generation desktop and enterprise perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) hard drive, and that beyond its cavernous 1TB of capacity features 7,200-rpm spin speeds, and 8.5ms average seek times and a 32MB cache.

Data is crammed onto four platters and according to Seagate, the drive provides cool operating temperatures and low power consumption than its peers thanks to PowerTrim technology. The company claims this delivers a 20 percent reduction in overall drive power consumption and a 55 percent reduction in watts-per-gigabyte.

The company says the drive also features an industry-best unrecoverable error rate that is 10 times better than desktop class drives and a 1.2 million hour Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF).

“The need for high-capacity storage in enterprise networks and home entertainment centres is almost insatiable,” said John Monroe, a research vice president at Gartner. “Historians may consider the shipment of 1TB drives as a watershed event for the industry but users will consider such devices commonplace. We believe 1TB (and larger) drives will become 'standard equipment'.”

The Barracuda ES.2 will be available in both SAS and SATA configurations and will begin shipping during the third quarter of 2007.

Comment on this story