Seagate ships 3.5-inch 2TB 6Gbps Constellation ES hard drive
By Darren Murph 
posted February 22nd 2010 6:13PM
posted February 22nd 2010 6:13PM
posted February 22nd 2010 6:13PM
A look back on popular stories from today in a specific year.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
if the price is somewhat reasonable my HP mediasmart may be getting a new Raid friend.
@neeko18 Have a feeling that the price is going to be a bit steep.
@tkrow21
On the other hand, when you consider 3.5 inch "floppy" disks would hold 1.44 Mb, these is great by comparison!
(If my 1990 self had known this would be possible 20 years later, I'd have freaked.)
@neeko18
it will be the same price of a 64 or 80gb SSD. And I'm not kiding.
@neeko18 I'm pretty sure your HP MediaSmart server doesn't take SAS drives.
Still waiting for a 1tb 2.5 inch 9.5mm high drive. The only 2.5 inch 1tb drive out is 12.5mm high, which will not fit in most laptops.
Would love to get 2 of those into a RAID1.
Maybe I'm crazy, but why on earth would you need a 6Gbps platter based drive? Especially one with only a 7200RPM spin speed? My impression was that the entire reason for the existence of 6Gbps SATA was for SSDs. Why does this thing exist?
@Delta
My guess would be, the density on the platters in increasing too. So this means they can read and write faster. But still not nearly as fast as SSD.
@Delta I assume the higher speed will make a MINOR difference in the performance of a drive like this. They still have RAM cache's on these things, and the areal density on the outer tracks might allow them to transfer at faster than 3Gbps for short periods. Yes of course it matters MORE on an SSD than on this drive though.
They make it SAS but it's only 7,200 RPM? And what's the point of even making a physical HDD compatible with 6GB/s? The only possible storage device out there that could saturate the new SATA are SSDs. And HAH, "best in class reliability"? For a Seagate hard drive? Excuse me while I laugh the night away.
@Prevacator
Agreed on all counts. I don't quite understand their thinking. Plus, Seagate Enterprise sounds like an oxymoron.
WD FTW!....?
All that porn needs a little leg room to stretch out into.
@BigD145
That's not a leg...
how long until SSD 1 or 2TB comes out???????!!!
@BrownSound
They are out there...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3eFgClKGMc
@Billy Gun
so are aliens, doesnt mean you'l ever get to meet one.
@BrownSound
What you should be asking is, how long untill you can afford to buy a SSD 2TB.
@BrownSound
Well They Are Viable Now But They Want To Make As Much Money As They Can At The Moment. And Also They Are Struggling To Produce Hight Speed Data Transfer With Higher Storage Capacity. I Say 18months Time Maybe :)
@Billy Gun
Not Really When They Contain 4x512MB SSD inside:)
@kade1878
Oh dear and holy master...down-voted for caps on every word.
@Delta I did the exact same... Why on Earth some people feel the need to type that way will forever be beyond me...
I say burn the damn thing!
Its like buying a x32 computer with more than 4GB of RAM!
Someones trying to slap us silly, but were better than that mister.
Bill Watkins is long gone, the current CEO's name is Steve Luczo. Get the facts right.
Can't help but want.
Seagate has the balls to claim that they have good reliability? Woah now.
@SecretAsianMan I actually agree with this. My choice is usually Western Digital, but many others avoid it like the plague. Maybe its a perception thing.
@Haro Im sure some of you remember how just last week Apple finally increases the warrenty time on their early Macbook models because of the faulty Seagate drives.
WD ftw.
Will this have 4K sector?
They need to work harder, and come out with a 4TB version of that.
Please wake be up when i get a 5tb+ size drive. I really want something in 10tb + size preferably 12 tb so i can actually get around to backing up my dvd collection and yes i have that many.
@danhawk911 By the time there are 10TB drives, you will be backing up Blu-ray discs and you'll feel stupid for requesting them to backup your DVDs... And you still won't have enough space.
@jafoman still with a collection of over 3,00+ dvds i want to back up and save them.
@danhawk911
DVD's are so September 10.
Backup your DVD in 5 Years is like backup a VHS in 2002
@Indyaner A lot of the anime titles i have probably will never seen day light on blu-ray or other formats got to protect what you have got.
Cool stuff
Instead of wasting cycles slapping together a hard drive with useless specs (a mechanical hard drive with a 6GB/s interface? seriously, guys?), perhaps Seagate's engineers should be doing something about their drives' dismal reputation for reliability.
It doesn't matter how fast your new interface is if your drives have had the worst reliability in the industry the last 3 years (http://gigazine.jp/img/2010/02/05/hdd_fail_2009/hdd_fail_200909.jpg)...
@jafoman still with a collection of over 3,000+ dvds i want to back up and save them.
@danhawk911
Backing up that much data onto a single drive would be incredibly stupid.
Seagate announced the last enterprise class 2TB 7,200 rpm Constellation drive last February 9th (2009), and it didn't ship until well into the 4th quarter. I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for this so-called shipping drive. By the time its available, most of the other manufacturers will have shipped their 6Gbps drives--I gave up waiting and bought 4 WD Caviar Blacks in September and the Constellations still weren't available yet, SEVEN MONTHS after they were announced...
Where is the difference between a typical Sata 2 hdd and this? I read somewhere that SAS and Sata have almost the same speed. Others say that it doesn't matter how fast you can move data between a pc and an hdd because the hdd must be able to write/read with the same speed and this isn't possible for most drives yet...
So, practically, what this new type of hdd means for customers except the big storage?
@Bobot
SAS drives spin at higher speeds (10K or 15K rpm) but they are smaller in capacity. They are designed better and use a more robust protocol set (SCSI compared to ATA), and usually come with longer warranties, and are subsequently mor expensive. They are usually about 30-50 MB\sec faster than SATA drives. A standard run of the mill SATA drive (let's take Seagate Barracuda AS 7200.12 for instance) will usually get somewhere around 70-90 MB\sec for reads and writes, depending on transfer size. As you can see, this is nowhere near maxing out the speed of the bus (3Gbps), even for SAS drives.
6Gbps SATA and SAS drives aren't really much faster then 3Gbps drives, but it allows the HBA to go faster -- provided you have enough drives to max out all of the PHYs.
A home user running one, two, or even four drives won't notice a difference. The increase in capacity is nice, and the industry IS moving more towards 6gb for both SATA and SAS, but there are 2 tb 3gbps drives also and I'm pretty sure they cost less. 3gb isn't getting EOL'd any time soon either...maybe in 3-5 years for end users; but in the enterprise environment a lot of people are and have been over the past year switching to 6Gb HBAs.
Also FYI, 3gb and 6gb are backwards compatible. Cabling *should* be compatible with both speeds as well, unless it's a really cheapo cable.