Seagate spins up a new line of hard drives, impressive 500GB per platter.
Seagate has fired out a new batch of 3.5-inch hard drives to satiate the needs of hungry storage fiends afar, and the specs are impressive. The platters feature a very high level of capacity, with the company claiming that these new disks wield the industry’s highest areal density of a mainstream desktop hard drive.
The new line is called the Barracuda 7200.12, and packs an areal density of 329 gigabits per square inch, which means that each platter can potentially hold an impressive 500GB. This is a significant jump from the previous Barracuda 7200.11 line whose platters, last year, saw an upgrade to 320GB.
The higher density is thanks to its use of perpendicular magnetic recording which stores magnetic data in an upright position rather than the old way of laying the magnetic bits down on the platter. See our favourite presentation from Hitachi if you’re not familiar with the concept of getting perpendicular (kick it).
As always, the theoretical transfer speeds are tasty, this twelfth-generation line apparently maxing-out at 160MB/s. Not only is this somewhat slower than the supported 3Gb/s (375MB/s) SATA interface allows, the number still shoots well ahead of the performance that regular users will likely see under non-synthetic environments, such as random-access and the real world.
Spinning at 7,200rpm, the drives will be available in capacities of 250GB, 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB. The 250GB drive features 8MB of cache, the 500GB includes 16MB, while the 750GB and 1TB editions double that to 32MB. Prices aren’t yet available, but we expect them to land in the same vicinity as their current equivalent models.
Although it’s still pushing the mechanical storage market, Seagate previously stated that it plans to launch its own brand of solid-state drives in the enterprise market (this year, in fact), although any movement in that area remains to be seen. The current economic downturn is probably not going to speed up any moves to an entirely different storage medium.
But sod solid-state drives for storage, if only because they’re expensive and, well, can’t store all that much. Now requiring merely four platters, those 2TB drives we’re all eagerly awaiting are just around the corner.
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