Seagate leaks 750GB Barracuda 7200.10

Well, it's been a rather long year or so since 500GB drives came into style as the standard for high end disks, but it looks like perpendicular recording will save the day in stagnant storage. Seagate's inadvertently leaked the Barracuda 7200.10 line of SATA drives with speeds up to 3Gbps (SATA II), 7200rpm, 4.16ms latency, NCQ, 16MB cache, and 750GB of storage. 750 freaking gigs, man. Just another step on the magic road to a 1 terabyte petabyte drive though, you know? [Warning: PDF link]

[Via DailyTech, thanks, Diego]

[ebob9 @ Apr 21st 2006 2:55AM]

Gimmie.

[Chris McDowell @ Apr 21st 2006 3:03AM]

Damn and I just bought 2x500GB sata drives for my server the other day. Damn, prices will probably be cheaper or higher capacity for roughly the same price. Damn Technological progress.

[Twist @ Apr 21st 2006 3:03AM]

Engadget writer Ryan Block wrote: "with speeds up to 3GBps".

Time for Ryan to learn the difference between bits and bytes. The speed is 3 Gbps (gigabits per second) which is about 8 times slower than 3 GBps (gigabytes per second). The marketing teams do this to us on purpose of course since 3 Gbps looks better than 375 MBps even though they are just two ways of saying the same thing.

[SYN @ Apr 21st 2006 3:46AM]

The TB in this computer is starting to look pretty pathetic. even moreso to discover 4 hard drives and no dvd drive.

hopefully this will drive the cost/gb of 500gig drives down to a more reasonable level. with 250gig drives being 50 cents per gig(cad), and 500gig drives being nearly 75 cents er gig, the 250giggers still look prety tasty to those with the case space

[Lee Richards @ Apr 21st 2006 5:47AM]

How long does it take to format these devices? I dread to think how long a CHKDSK would take!

[Pedro Pinheiro @ Apr 21st 2006 6:20AM]

I have a "bet" running on my blog, on how long it will take for us to have a one petabyte storage device that can be carried on a pocket.
http://matsu.blogdns.net/?p=58

[Jordan @ Apr 21st 2006 8:27AM]

Pretty sure Ryan freakin' Block knows the difference between bits and bytes, Twist! Simple mistake, no need for condescension.

[Torontoguy @ Apr 21st 2006 9:03AM]

I have about 500Gb on my home PC and I am sure that there will come a time when Terabyte (and larger) storage is the rule for home machines. One question I have is: What backup solutions is everybody using? and Do you spread your storage (and catastrophic failure) risk over several drives or chance it with a single large drive?

[Joe Smith @ Apr 21st 2006 9:09AM]

3. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!! And I was so happy, because i thought it would take only 4 minutes to transfer 750 Gigs of data to it. It actually takes about 33 minutes (which isn't really that bad).

[Jared Dilg @ Apr 21st 2006 9:26AM]

Why do the last two guys have -1 stars?

Anyway, Torontoguy brings up a good point. What backup solutions will potential buyers of this disk implement? And, with this much space, what kind of data would you store on it? If you filled it with torrented movies then I guess a backup solution isn't that important, given the value of the data. But, you'd be a fool to archive all of your family's home movies on this drive and not have it backed up somewhere. Are there cheap enough tape backup systems that can accommodate more than 500GB?

[ginnal @ Apr 21st 2006 9:37AM]

"4.16ms"

Nice.

[Scabies @ Apr 21st 2006 10:01AM]

True, I had a major issue when my 80gB wasnt backed up, I cant imagine the pain and grief of up to 750 lost. Not that I could, in my life, come up with that much data, unless I start toting my camcorder around and digitizing stuff at about 7gB/hr. Insanity.
I think I'll just grab a quad of the 250's, as long as they have the 16mb buffer w/SATAII. but shiznit, 3tB? (*people start torrenting entire TV stations*)

[Pfft @ Apr 21st 2006 10:09AM]

Just give me a couple hundred gigs in a 2.5 drive, please. Thanks.

[Pfft @ Apr 21st 2006 10:13AM]

FWIW, I can remember my first PowerBook (a 160, back in '92) and its 40MB (that's MEGAbyte) drive. When I finally upped it to a 256MB drive, I felt that it was ridiculously oversized, and I'd never fill it up.

Also, 750GB is nothing to those in the creative fields (digital arts, film, etc.). Not everyone is a hobbyist filling up their computer with torrent flicks; some really do need this kind of fast space for work.

And for backup, you get another drive (or more). My business has a four-tiered backup (a RAID onsite for the main Mac and three other drives which rotate off-site). Most of my clients have ditched tape and CD/DVD backup in favor of just using other external drives, which are comparatively cheap and a lot easier to use in terms of backup execution.

[Aaron @ Apr 21st 2006 10:42AM]

I agree with Pfff, I do alot of video editing/animation/photography/music production, the music and photography don't take up alot of space, but even a single mini DV tape takes up over 16gb.

[Andrew @ Apr 21st 2006 11:11AM]

Wow, a ReadyNAS box loaded with these will get you 3 terabytes. (2.25 using RAID5)

[Luis E. Alvarez @ Apr 21st 2006 11:49AM]

I would like to pre-order two please...

hehe.

[Carlton Bale @ Apr 21st 2006 4:05PM]

Don't forget the fact that Seagate announced 500GB drives in a press release dated June 2004. However, they didn't actually ship them until October 2005. If the same is true in this case, we'll see 750GB drives available in Aug 2007.

I know it took this long to release the 500GB drives because I was waiting the entire time. I have 4 of these in a RAID5 array. RAID is what I use as a backup to protect against a drive failure. If one drive fails, I swap it out with a replacement, the array rebuilds, and I never have to even turn my computer off. (Of course, if two drives fail at the same time, I'm screwed, but statistics suggest this is pretty rare.)

[Ryan Block @ Apr 21st 2006 7:53PM]

Twist, I know the difference, thanks much. No need for the patronizing comment!

Best, Ryan

[i know i'm a bastard @ Apr 22nd 2006 6:06AM]

#5/lee:
who the hell uses CHKDSK anymore?... seriously.

#18/carlton:
thanks for the RAID primer... not so seriously.

[Ali @ Apr 22nd 2006 8:19AM]

Guys who uses so much space unless and untill u want dvds stored on your computer...and i think thats totally insane.

[Zach @ Apr 22nd 2006 8:27PM]

Dang!

For those of us in the arts, this thing is heaven!! I have negative scas of up to 500 megs.....and psd files of up to 250. Heck, my fractal prints are up to 1 gig each. This'd be a great little tool. and its so small itll fit in my desktop.

wonder what the price is gonna be....

[vern @ Apr 23rd 2006 7:55AM]

you put the stuff on your computer that windows will need. download alittle next thing you know you just filled an 80gig drive in two mths. it could happen.

[Scott Custin @ Apr 26th 2006 7:53PM]

To answer Pedro Pinheiro: Depends on how much you want to pay, but it could be a couple of decades.

Flash memory capacity per dollar seems to double every year. 2gb flash drives seem to be running around $100 these days. That would imply:

2010: 32gb for $100. Many laptops will eliminate hard drives.

2015: 1TB for $100. It may be cheaper for movie and record companies to sell you drives with lots of programming and have you pay to unlock items you want.

2020: 32TB for $100. Will anyone be making hard drives any more?

2025: 1 petabyte for $100.

[GilvAar @ Apr 27th 2006 12:13AM]

Backup? Just double the equation, get 2 or 12; what eva. How many-of-you only have 1 computer?

Itz all disposable anyway, remember you cant take it with you. Though I do want MORE!!!!!

Jon

[Dave @ May 2nd 2006 5:36PM]

#18, Carlton... Just remember that RAID is not a backup solution. It can save your butt in the event of a hardware failure (most of the time), but offers no protection against user error. For backup, you should probably have drives that you can copy the data to, then take offsite.