Seagate Technologies has announced a new breed of Constellation hard disk drives that includes 2TB (2000GB) model. The new family of hard drives, which are primarily designed for enterprises, includes new features that enable high capacities, increased power efficiency, enterprise-class reliability, and data security.

The Constellation 2.5” hard drives are offered in capacities of 160GB and 500GB with both Serial ATA-300 and new SAS 2.0 interface running at 6Gb/s speeds. As the first SAS 2.0 nearline drive, the Constellation hard drive enables larger external storage topologies, 100% faster data throughput and higher signal strength over greater distances, according to Seagate. The Constellation family will begin shipping this quarter.

The 3.5” Constellation ES hard drives will be available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities with both Serial Attached SCSI interface as well as a Serial ATA interfaces. The Constellation ES hard drives will ship only in calendar Q3, four to six months later compared to Western Digital’s Caviar Green 2TB hard drives, which are available already. However, Seagate’s 2TB device will support 7200rpm spindle speed, whereas WD’s HDD features variable spindle speed of up to 7200rpm.

Both Constellation and Constellation ES hard drives include PowerChoice technology from Seagate, which decreases power consumption by up to 54% for record power savings in enterprise environments, the company said.

The Constellation breed of hard disk drives are offered with optional self-encrypting drive (SED) technology and provide government-grade data security through the drive’s life cycle.

Seagate Constellation family of drives are rated at a full 1.2 million hours meantime before failure (MTBF).

Tags: Seagate