Monday, September 21st 2009
Seagate Readies its First SATA 6 Gbps Hard Drive
Hard drive specialist Seagate is readying its first line of performance hard drives to feature the new SATA 6 Gb/s interface, under the banner Barracuda XT. Some of the first in this family include 2 TB drives made with 500 GB platters, with spindle speeds of 7200 rpm. The drives will feature 64 MB caches, and are expected to sustain transfer rates of 140 MB/s. These drives are expected to have rated MTBF at 750,000 hours and are backed by 5 year company warranty.
The Seagate Barracuda XT faces competition from WD Caviar Black 2 TB, even as the latter features the SATA 3 Gb/s interface. The contribution of the interface bandwidth to the actual performance remains largely to be seen, although developments in the fields of solid-state drives show them to have a bright future with the SATA 6 Gb/s interface. The Seagate Barracuda XT is expected to cost around US $300, and will start shipping later this week.
Sources:
The Tech Report, TechConnect Magazine
The Seagate Barracuda XT faces competition from WD Caviar Black 2 TB, even as the latter features the SATA 3 Gb/s interface. The contribution of the interface bandwidth to the actual performance remains largely to be seen, although developments in the fields of solid-state drives show them to have a bright future with the SATA 6 Gb/s interface. The Seagate Barracuda XT is expected to cost around US $300, and will start shipping later this week.
24 Comments on Seagate Readies its First SATA 6 Gbps Hard Drive
And it's nice to see them back with a 5 year warranty on these :)
It is impractical to make a 300MB(3Gb)ps mechanical hard drive.Sata 6gig is for SSD's
>> Build a drive with TWO head arms 180° opposite from each other, so there are now TWO heads on each platter surface. You RAID 0 the heads. The alternative it so have just one arm, but with two heads at the end, offset by a small amount.
To fit the double arm system in a 3.5" drive, you would need to reduce the size of the platters somewhat. Not as small as a 2.5" drive, probably somewhere in between.
Capacity would go down a bit, but performance would double, and seek times would improve in the double-arm approach (you would constrain each head arm to use only half of the disk, so there would be less head movement and seek time for each arm), but remain the same in the double-head approach.
There are ways of doing it... but the question is are the economics right for the market? Possibly it will be the only way to keep HDDs competitive against SSDs.
I wonder if they're (Samsung) trying to make their new 500GB platters work blazing fast then put them into the 6Gb/s bracket so that they don't get the, "What's the speed increase?" complaint that everyone is giving.:p
I also wonder what the price of the 1GB version will be from each company?:confused:
:P
I agree, but think it's better to remove the bottleneck before it arises.
Lol, and think about it everyone... the storage side of the news has been really lacking, so this gives them a story, ROFL!:roll:
It is a technological step forward. Doesn't matter if the drives actually use it or not. It just starts to force the interface to become mainstream quicker.
Though I will be sticking to getting a sustained throughput of 84 MB/s on a 5400 RPM Sammy F3.
What they really should do is force SSDs to mainsteam, not $300 HDDs that can't even utilize the original SATA 1.5Gb/s.
They would be unbelievably fast because you would RAID0 across all the heads... if there were 512 heads then you could get 64 way RAID or better. (cant do them ALL at the same time due to magnetic interference)
However, it would be a big change in how they are made... and I would imagine wiring multiple heads would be expensive... and the processing power to handle that data trhoughput would have to be an order of magnitude higher than today. But doable. They would probably also be more shock tolerant... since MOST HDD damage is due to arm moving the wrong way and folding the heads over.