Seagate crams 250GB on a single Barracuda platter

Just a day after Hitachi and Philips boasted about its newest external 1TB offerings, Seagate is up on its own soap box clamoring over the "industry's first 250GB-per-disc, 3.5-inch disc drive." Touting the second-generation of perpendicular magnetic recording technology, the newest Barracuda 7200.10 stretches areal density limits by stuffing 180Gb per square inch, and also manages to "set new benchmarks" for power consumption, acoustics, and performance. The drives will feature a 3Gbps SATA interface and should pop up in future external models, but for now you can probably grab one in a retail box as Seagate has reportedly achieved worldwide volume deployments.

[Via TGDaily]

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 7th 2007 10:13PM]

Wow. The title of the article makes you think that its a single platter 250GB drive.

[simbadogg Posted Jun 8th 2007 12:01AM]

yeah, same thing i was thinking...but i was thinking to myself "what would be the point of release a single platter perpendicular drive...w/ only 250 gb of storage" though i'm sure lots of people would be fine w/ 250, thats just not seagates style

[nrp Posted Jun 7th 2007 11:20PM]

It very well could be. The higher the density of a platter, the better the read/write performance, in general. It's also cheaper to manufacture a single platter drive than a multi platter drive. So, I wouldn't be surprised if Seagate shifts as many of its drives as possible to 250gb platters, from 250gb ones up to 1 or 1.25tb.

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 8th 2007 12:08AM]

Maybe because it is (RTFA much?).

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 7th 2007 10:49PM]

So, how much storage is on the drive? 250GB?

-Baldwin

[roflercopterer Posted Jun 7th 2007 10:58PM]

wait what?

[Bman21212 Posted Jun 7th 2007 11:47PM]

Competing 3.5” technologies, including the 1 TB drive from Hitachi GST, store 200 GB per platter and achieve an areal density of 144 Gb per square inch. At least theoretically, the new platters will allow Seagate to roll out hard drives with five platters and a total capacity of 1.25 TB.
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They haven't released a product yet. Just a proclamation that they can, and might soon.

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 8th 2007 12:24AM]

Very cool. I'm not well versed in how number of platters and such impacts drive performance, but I would assume that if Hitachi's 1 TB drive uses five platters and Seagate is capable of building one with only four that that would yield a performance increase.

Anyway, way to go, Seagate.

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 12th 2007 11:22AM]

Seagate's press release does indeed state that they are now shipping these drives, but I just called Seagate's pre-sales support line, and the rep informed me that he had *no* information about the new drive (I was just looking for the model number).

I had to point him to the actual press release on Seagate's own site, and after reading it, he told me that for the first few months following a new HDD release, it will only be available as OEM. I then asked if I could still purchase the OEM version (online @ newegg and the like), and he said no. Something fishy here...