X-bit labs

Seagate Readies 750GB Hard Disk Drives.

Category: Storage

by Anton Shilov

[ 04/20/2006 | 11:52 AM ]

Seagate Technology, the world’s largest manufacturer of hard disk drives (HDD), is about to commercially release its hard drive with unprecedented capacity of 750GB. The new drive not only utilizes perpendicular recording technologies, but also makes use of some recently developed capabilities aimed to boost reliability of HDDs.

Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.10 hard disk drive series will be available in 750GB, 500GB, 400GB, 320GB, 300GB, 250GB and 200GB capacities and with 8MB or 16MB caches depending on the model and will be compatible with computers featuring Parallel ATA-100 or Serial ATA-150/300 with native command queuing (NCQ) technology support connections. The new products will use 7200rpm motors, however, currently Seagate does not declare any performance data concerning the new HDDs.

According to Akiba PC Hotline web-site, Barracuda 7200.10 750GB model sports 16MB cache and can boast with 100GB maximum sustainable transfer rate, which is inline with previous generation enterprise-class hard disk drives.

The family of hard drives features Adaptive Fly Height technology that, according to Seagate, offers consistent read/write performance from the beginning to end of computing workloads and also sport Clean Sweep feature that automatically calibrates a hard drive each time it is powered up.

Perpendicular recording gets its name from the vertical alignment of data bits on the plane of the disk, which takes less room in contrast to the horizontal orientation of today’s longitudinal recording technology. To be accurately recorded and read, the more closely-packed perpendicular bits also require a closer association between the read/write head and the recording media. Hitachi said earlier this year it had achieved the 230Gb/in2 density by manipulating the head and media so that the distance between them is a mere 10nm.

Seagate did not comment on the news-story.