Bigger and Faster Hard Drives
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Since Seagate began shipping 750GB hard drives in April 2006, no manufacturer has released a drive that has hit the hallowed 1TB mark. However, Seagate has announced that it will begin shipping 1TB drives in the first half of this year, and the drives will use perpendicular technology, which is increasingly allowing hard drives to shatter previous capacity records.
The company’s current 750GB drives also use perpendicular recording, which allows more data to be stored on disks than traditional longitudinal recording. Seagate claims that its 1TB drives will also use fewer heads and disks than drives of similar capacity that are expected to be released, which will help to increase drive reliability and reduce operating temperatures, power consumption, noise, and weight.
Seagate is also making moves on the speed front, announcing a new 2.5-inch, 15,000rpm drive that the company claims is “the world’s fastest hard drive.” The Savvio 15K drive features a seek time of just 2.9ms (milliseconds), or far less than the roughly 8.5ms seek
times found in 7,200rpm drives.
On the downside for consumers, the new drive uses an SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) interface and is initially aimed at data center customers.
View Seagate 750GB Internal Ultra SATA-16MB now.