Seagate can't stop announcing 1TB disks: Barracuda 7200.11 and ES.2

Perhaps due to the raging insecurities of playing catchup to Hitachi's 1TB disk, Seagate just announced a couple more 1TB drives in what has quickly become a confusing HDD line-up. Joining their previously announced 1TB Barracuda 7200.10 are the SATA-equipped Barracuda 7200.11 for consumers and business class Barracuda ES.2 with SAS interface. This time however, Seagate had the good manners to at least provide a date and price: Q3 and $399.99. Right, exactly the same price as Hitachi's 7K1000.

Update: Seagate just gave us some clarification on the 7200.10 vs. 7200.11: "The 7200.10 that was announced was a 250GB single-platter design; the purpose of it was to leverage the new areal densities we achieved and put it into the current 7200.10 chassis with the core electronics. It is shipping today. The 7200.11 and ES.2 use the same areal densities but are a new generation design with updated electronics, etc." So there you have it.

[vasu @ Jun 25th 2007 9:57AM]

The 1TB 7200.10 was a disspointment to me since it only had a 16MB cache while the Hitachi had a 32MB cache. But, looks like the 7200.11 and ES.2 have 32MB caches, wooo. Can't wait to see a 7K1000 vs 7200.11 shootout

[Jaxim @ Jun 25th 2007 10:00AM]

1024 GB = 1 TB

Do does this drive actually have 800-900 usable GB space, not the 1024 GB that it should? It should be illegal for these harddrive manufacturers say a harddrive has a certain amount of GB when it actually has less. If a 1 TB drive can only have a certain percentage of usable GB space, then the manufacturers should increase the amount of space so the consumer actually gets 1 full terabyte of space.

[greg @ Jun 25th 2007 10:06AM]

It should not be illegal for hard drives manufacturers to state it has 1 TB when it has less USABLE SPACE because its true. Read the first post of this thread and it will tell you the truth. :)

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=118330

[John B @ Jun 25th 2007 10:13AM]

Uh oh. Cue the purists who will insist that you refer to 1024^4 by that unbearably pathetic name "tebibyte". But I fully agree. If the computer sees 1 TB as 1024^4 (and all of them do), then that's exactly how hard drives should be sold, not under this bullsh*t premise of 10^12 in order to deceptively inflate real storage potential.

[Jaxim @ Jun 25th 2007 10:37AM]

@greg
My point is that the manufacturers should be advertising the Decimal Capacity, NOT the Binary Capacity. If they advertise 1 Terabyte of space, then users should see 1 Terabyte of usable harddrive space.

[morcheeba @ Jun 25th 2007 12:10PM]

I agree... There's a perfectly good decimal name that they should be using instead: the trillion-byte drive.

[insignis @ Aug 29th 2007 3:37AM]

Jaxim, you mean they should be advertising the binary way, not the decimal way. Decimal is base 10, hence using 1000 like HDD manufacturers do is the decimal way. Using multiples of 1024 (2^10) is the decimal way, and the way OSes typically report disk usage. In standard English usage, a kilo-something is a thousand of them. It's the way OSes report things that's off; a terabyte *should be* a trillion bytes. That's what tera means (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tera-).

[insignis @ Aug 29th 2007 3:46AM]

Oops... "multiples of 1024 (2^10) is the decimal way" should say it "is the binary way"--that will teach me to post at 2 am.

[boe @ Jun 25th 2007 10:32AM]

Umm - is this the same company that announced their new 7200.2 mamouth drives for notebooks to steal another company's thunder - still can't buy them.

[tagx @ Jun 25th 2007 10:43AM]

105Mb/s sustained transfer rate!

[Chuckles McGee @ Jun 25th 2007 2:41PM]

Oh wow, updated electronics! Man, can't wait to get me some of those!

[David Szabados @ Jun 25th 2007 4:11PM]

Just a quick clarification on the above Blog. The 7200.10 that was announced was a 250GB single-platter design; the purpose of it was to leverage the new areal densities we achieved and put it into the current 7200.10 chassis with the core electronics. It is shipping today. The 7200.11 and ES.2 use the same areal densities but are a new generation design with updated electronics, etc.
David

[mike @ Jun 25th 2007 6:06PM]

I'm glad the other manuractures are right on the heels of hitachi....but i still don't see any of the drives actually for sale anywhere despite the claim they are shipping. my two hitachi on order don't show a ship date. a quick scan online yields nothing on the seagate either.

[t-b told @ Jun 26th 2007 2:27PM]

Seagate uses the media to get your bus. all the others sell on product strength. don't waist your money buy the Hitachi drive.

[t-b told @ Jun 26th 2007 2:30PM]

They may be right on the heels of hitachi but wait awhile the reliablillity isn't there with seagate and the others. Hitachi had this technology for quite sometime and already experienced and fixed the problems the others are having because they rushed just to claim they have it out there. Go with what works, that would be hitachi

[insignis @ Aug 29th 2007 3:43AM]

Oops... "multiples of 1024 (2^10) is the decimal way" should instead say it "is the binary way"--that will teach me to post at 2 am.

[insignis @ Aug 29th 2007 3:52AM]

No preview, no edit, no delete. Fantastic. I replied to the appropriate thing above, so just ignore this dupe.