Seagate Unveils One Terabyte Hard Drives Amid Explosive Growth of Digital Content

[Dashken]

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif., — June 25, 2007 — Seagate (NYSE: STX) today announced 1 terabyte (TB) hard drives that deliver an industry-leading combination of capacity, performance and reliability for a wide range of enterprise and desktop PC applications as rampant growth of digital content continues worldwide.

This explosive growth of digital content in the home and the office is driving demand for massive amounts of hard drive storage. Businesses and consumers are generating and consuming staggering volumes of digital content – from high-definition video, music, blogs and podcasts, to Computer Assisted Design (CAD) and other large graphics files, critical business records, archived emails, and database and file server data. Seagate is focused on delivering the industry’s most advanced hard drives to satisfy the world’s growing need for digital content, from the home to the hand to the car and the office.

“The need for high-capacity storage in enterprise networks and home entertainment centers 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’ in, on or near virtually every television set in the world as well as in a variety of multi-user environments.”

As the industry’s only second-generation desktop and enterprise perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) hard drives, the Barracuda 7200.11 and Barracuda ES.2 deliver 1TB of capacity, 7,200-rpm spin speeds, average seek times of 8.5ms, caches up to 32MB and Seagate’s industry-leading five-year limited warranty. Seagate’s newest hard drives pack 1TB of data on just four discs to provide cool operating temperatures and low power consumption, which help extend drive life.

The Flagship of High-Capacity Enterprise Storage – Barracuda ES.2
The Barracuda ES.2 is a newly designed product optimized 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.

The Barracuda ES.2 hard drive’s robust new features stand out in performance, reliability, capacity, and energy efficiency. Among them is its new RVFF (Rotational Vibration Feed Forward) system, designed to sustain performance in densely-packed multi-drive systems. The Barracuda ES.2 also boosts reliability with 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 at full 24 x 7 data availability.

With the introduction of the Barracuda ES.2, Seagate is first to provide customers with a SAS interface option in addition to SATA. SAS offers greater levels of reliability, data integrity and performance for business-critical and nearline enterprise environments. The choice of SATA or SAS also enables greater system-design and integration flexibility for solution builders and OEMs.

“EqualLogic’s customers have an insatiable demand for increasing capacities and high performance in their networked storage solutions,” said John Joseph, vice president of Marketing at EqualLogic. “Seagate’s strategy of offering a SAS or SATA version of a 1TB disk drive demonstrates leadership in recognizing that customers want high performance and high capacity disks for enterprise storage. Serving both needs with a single interface like SAS simplifies technology design decisions and customer choices.”

Seagate’s new PowerTrim technology is integrated into the Barracuda ES.2 and dynamically manages drive power consumption at all levels of activity. With PowerTrim, the Barracuda ES.2 addresses the IT dilemma facing energy-constrained data centers by delivering a 20% reduction in overall drive power consumption and a best-in-class 55% reduction in watts-per-gigabyte.

Desktop Storage – Barracuda 7200.11
Award-winning Barracuda hard drives are the industry standard for computing applications ranging from mainstream, high-performance and gaming PCs to workstations and desktop RAID. Now with over 42 million PMR Seagate drives already shipped, the proven technology and components of the 11th generation Barracuda 7200-Series hard drive enables Seagate to deliver high-volume shipments of the 1TB drive with the highest levels of quality and reliability – essential in ensuring long drive life.

“Seagate is a valued and trusted supplier to Nor-Tech, and has always maintained the highest levels of field-proven reliability with consistent product delivery,” said David Bollig, president of Nor-Tech. “We look forward to enhancing our portfolio of offerings using Seagate’s new Barracuda drives that will offer even more choice and value for Nor-Tech’s customers.”

The Barracuda 7200.11 stands alone in performance among high-capacity desktop hard drives, with category-leading 105MB/s sustained transfer rate – the highest ever. And with a low power rating of 8 watts at idle, the Barracuda 7200.11 is not only energy-efficient, but also operates cooler, increasing reliability. Barracuda 7200.11 also delivers industry-leading acoustics, as low as 2.7 Bels, which is nearly undetectable by the human ear.

The Barracuda ES.2 and 7200.11 will begin shipping in volume during the third quarter. The 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 will be offered at an MSRP of $399.99.

1TB Hard Drives for Consumer and Video Applications Expand High Capacity Footprint Even Further
Seagate remains the only hard drive manufacturer dedicated to the digital entertainment, security and surveillance markets with hard drives built to specifically address these unique applications. Seagate will extend its offerings in this area from the new 1TB platform and will provide details as these new products become available.

Videocast: Seagate Reaches Terabyte Milestone
To view the videocast interview featuring Marc Jourlait, Seagate vice president Global Marketing, visit http://www.podtech.net/home/3380/sea...byte-milestone

Source: http://www.seagate.com/

[slugbug]

That'll hold a lot of p0rn

[Adrian Wong]

W00T! Seagate's finally out with their 1TB drives!

[Dashken]

Indeed.

[Chai]

Only the LICH can afford.

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by Chai

Only the LICH can afford.

That's true... although the MSRP of $399.99 (should be lower in retail or e-tail) for a 1TB drive isn't really that expensive per GB.

[Chai]

It took them like 2 years to make 500GB affordable.

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by Chai

It took them like 2 years to make 500GB affordable.

Yeah, but prices will drop. Cost per GB is pretty okay for this new drive (@ around RM 1.35 / USD 0.40 per GB). It only costs a lot because it has 1TB of storage. Hah.. So the total unit cost is high.

Of course, I don't see this as a mass-market product. Volume will definitely be low, and the price drop slower. But the price will definitely drop... EVENTUALLY.

[Chai]

Time to get WD5000KS!!!

[Brian]

not yet for me though, it seems that due to the slow movement of the 500gb hdd stock in malaysia, it hasn't dropped to the expected rm380-390 level which is the typical price in the US now

to be honest, i'm more impressed with the samsung 1tb hard drive. 334GB per platter