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]
[Via TGDaily]

















Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Matt @ Jun 7th 2007 10:13PM
Wow. The title of the article makes you think that its a single platter 250GB drive.
SimbaDogg @ 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
cmonkey @ 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.
David @ Jun 7th 2007 10:49PM
So, how much storage is on the drive? 250GB?
-Baldwin
akijikan @ Jun 7th 2007 10:58PM
wait what?
Bman21212 @ 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.
Jason Petersen @ Jun 8th 2007 12:08AM
Maybe because it is (RTFA much?).
tiuk @ 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.
holywood @ 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...