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Seagate Unveils 750 GB Hard Drive

FFTT

FFTT

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Apr 17, 2004
2,952
1
A Stoned Throw From Ground Zero
I was surfing the Chinese web sights and came across this.

1146209085_H2iAAX.jpg


BEIJING, April 28(Xinhuanet)-- The California storage giant Seagate on Wednesday introduced its Barracuda 7200.10, the first computer desktop hard disk to reach the 750-gigabyte storage mark, being 50 percent larger than the previous 500-gigabyte marker leader.
The new 7,200-rpm Barracuda can hold some 25 DVDs, 50 hours of home video, 15,000 songs, 15,000 digital pictures, and 50 computer games-- and still have 300 GB of free space left over.

The record-setting product is based on a cutting-edge technology called"perpendicular recording," which stacks bits vertically on the surface of the drive instead of horizontally, enabling Seagate to achieve greater data density and higher transfer speeds without increasing the speed of the drive's spindle.

Perpendicular recording provides up to a five-fold increase in storage capacity over earlier magnetic-recording techniques, according to Seagate spokesperson Michael Hall.

Seagate said the new, bigger Barracuda line-- now shipping worldwide for a price of 599 U.S. dollars-- is aimed at meeting the demand for more and more digital storage among consumers and organizations.

http://english.sina.com/technology/p/1/2006/0428/74242.html

This has got to be cool for those needing massive storage capabilties.
 
Excellent. Is this the first perpendicular consumer-standard 3.5" hard-drive?

I imagine prices will come down in a year or so. Maybe this will also make 500gb drives cheaper as well.

I want one. No, two...
 
FFTT said:
Just gives me the grins to imagine 1.5 TB storage in my G5 :D
Click to expand...

Just had a look at Seagate's website. They're SATA-only. Can't find any UK distributors yet but I imagine they'll be in the £400-450 range. :eek:

One day, drives like these with capacity such as this will be common-place.
 
Graphicump already found the review at Macworld.
She's a fast woman she is! :D

http://www.macworld.com/2006/04/firstlooks/seagate750/index.php

Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.10 750GB drive, the largest hard drive to date, sets new high-water marks for capacity, price, and performance. Its speed was especially notable on the PC World Test Center’s write tests, where it came within a hair’s breadth of matching Western Digital’s swift 10,000-rpm Raptor X.
The Barracuda 7200.10 drive that our test center evaluated has 16MB of cache and supports SATA-150 by default, out of the box. (An external version equipped with USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 is slated to ship in May.) We tested it using SATA-300, which required a jumper-setting change.

In our performance tests, the Barracuda 7200.10 750GB excelled across the spectrum. Among the bevy of 7,200-rpm drives we’ve tested, it ranked first; and overall, it was bested only by the 10,000-rpm Raptor X. On our write tests, the new Seagate drive took just 2 minutes, 16 seconds to write a 3.06GB file of folders (a scant 2 seconds slower than the Raptor X), and 1 minute, 39 seconds to write a 3.06GB .zip file (a mark 3 seconds better than the Raptor X’s).

http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/marketing/detail/0,1081,756,00.html
 
FFTT said:
Graphicump already found the review at Macworld.
She's a fast woman she is! :D

http://www.macworld.com/2006/04/firstlooks/seagate750/index.php

Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.10 750GB drive, the largest hard drive to date, sets new high-water marks for capacity, price, and performance. Its speed was especially notable on the PC World Test Center’s write tests, where it came within a hair’s breadth of matching Western Digital’s swift 10,000-rpm Raptor X.
The Barracuda 7200.10 drive that our test center evaluated has 16MB of cache and supports SATA-150 by default, out of the box. (An external version equipped with USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 is slated to ship in May.) We tested it using SATA-300, which required a jumper-setting change.

In our performance tests, the Barracuda 7200.10 750GB excelled across the spectrum. Among the bevy of 7,200-rpm drives we’ve tested, it ranked first; and overall, it was bested only by the 10,000-rpm Raptor X. On our write tests, the new Seagate drive took just 2 minutes, 16 seconds to write a 3.06GB file of folders (a scant 2 seconds slower than the Raptor X), and 1 minute, 39 seconds to write a 3.06GB .zip file (a mark 3 seconds better than the Raptor X’s).

http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/marketing/detail/0,1081,756,00.html
Click to expand...

Not only is it huge, but it is also very fast! :)
 
News travels fast these days, arstechnica is covering it too.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060426-6684.html


Seagate's new drive uses perpendicular recording technology to record the individual bits vertically instead of laying them out longitudinally on the hard drive platters. It was Maxtor (which was recently acquired by Seagate) that first developed a cost-effective means of manufacturing perpendicular drives, but it took another two-plus years before the first drives came to market. Seagate's initial effort was a 160GB laptop drive that used the same amount of physical space as longitudinal 120GB drives. Last week, the company came out with a 300GB SCSI hard drive.

Seagate's new Barracuda 7200.10 is a Serial ATA drive and comes with either 8MB or 16MB of cache. As is the case with all of Seagate's drives, the 7200.10 has a 5-year warranty. Suggested retail price is US$559 and the drives are supposedly in transit to distributors.

High-capacity hard drives like this make the presence of only two drive bays in my Power Macintosh G5 a little easier to take. If you are up a similar creek, running out of places to put hard drives, but not wanting to go the Firewire 400/800 or USB 2.0 route, there is another option. External SATA, or eSATA, appears to finally be hitting the market in force. eSATA enclosures are also becoming more widely available, and some motherboards offer built-in support for the connection technology. They work similarly to Firewire and USB enclosures, but with much higher data throughput speeds. Find yourself an enclosure with room for four drives, fill it up with 750GB 7200.10s, and you've got 3TB to play with. ExtremeTech has an overview of eSATA tech and a review of a LaCie enclosure if you're jonesing for fast external storage.
 
Illustrates the point that drive performance isn't necessarily about rotational speed, its about how many bits you can pass under the heads per second.
You can

1) increase speed
(as in the Raptors - but what they don't tell you is that the platters are smaller. The outside tracks of a smaller platter don't have as many sectors as a larger platter because one circuit of the platter is a shorter distance -- that's why a 7200 RPM laptop drive at 2.5" diameter will never equal a 7200 RPM 3.5" diameter desktop drive in performance. But I digress...)

or
2) increase density of the data and leave the speed alone, which is what perpendicular recording does.

In one "lap" around the platter, the head can read much more data. So if it reads -as an imaginary example- double the data in one 7200th of a second, then the maximum sustained performance would be comparable to a 14,400 RPM drive at normal density.

Another way to increase performance is parallelism - have more heads and more platter surfaces. This was tried in the big server drives, but it was found that adding weight and complexity with extra platters was undesirable, esp. if you want cooler running, slimmer drives. Also, you lose some of the benefits because all the heads have to move as one unit, so even though you split the data between platters, you couldn't access the data in parallel.

The easiest and cheapest way to high performance is multiple drives -- where the heads of each drive are truly free agents and can be seeking in parallel.
 
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