Wednesday, April 3rd 2013

Seagate Ships 4 TB-class Hard Drives with 1 TB Per Platter Density

by
btarunr
 Discuss (32 Comments)
Seagate reportedly began shipping the industry's first 4 TB-class hard drives with 1 TB per platter density. Slotted in the company's Barracuda 7200.15 series, the drive provides 4000 GB of unformatted space, backed by 7,200 RPM spindle-speed, 64 MB buffer, and SATA 6 Gb/s interface. The drive is said to provide sequential speeds as high as 146 MB/s, with the 6 Gb/s interface enhancing buffer-to-host burst speeds. When it reaches stores, the OEM trim (drive-only) can be purchased for as low as US $190, and the retail version (boxed, with cables and documentation), for $212. At these prices, Seagate is claiming the lowest price-per-GB for any internal storage device in the industry. The terabyte platter technology should also make it possible for Seagate to launch a 5-platter 5000 GB hard drive soon.
Source: MaximumPC

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32 Comments on Seagate Ships 4 TB-class Hard Drives with 1 TB Per Platter Density

#26
repman244
FordGT90Concepthe platters act like an internal RAID0. It can read and write to all platters simultaneously.
Are you sure about that? Because when you look at the performance of the 1,2 and 3TB version of this drive (all of them are 7200RPM and 1TB per platter) it doesn't seem so.
And not to mention the risk of data loss with 8 R/W heads....
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#27
Prima.Vera
FordGT90ConceptThe platters act like an internal RAID0. It can read and write to all platters simultaneously. It should also get a nice performance bump going from 750 GB/platter to 1 TB/platter. I think it could hit 200 MB/s sequential.
Noup. Not by far. Having multiple platters doesn't work like internal RAID.
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#28
freaksavior
To infinity ... and beyond!
I paid $160 each for my 2tb and I bought 4... I love technology prices.
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#29
FordGT90Concept
"I go fast!1!11!1!"
repman244Are you sure about that? Because when you look at the performance of the 1,2 and 3TB version of this drive (all of them are 7200RPM and 1TB per platter) it doesn't seem so.
And not to mention the risk of data loss with 8 R/W heads....
Prima.VeraNoup. Not by far. Having multiple platters doesn't work like internal RAID.
Yeah, I did some research and the general consensus is that they don't. The main reason why they don't is because a bad sector on one platter would effectively make that area on all platters unusable (capacity would fall much faster due to bad sectors). There's also an issue of circuitry to handle read/writes on 2-5 heads simultaneously.

If they really wanted to improve performance, it is something HDD manufacturers likely could try but, as far as I know, it hasn't been done yet.
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#30
Prima.Vera
Yeah. Actually, multi platerrs HDD are slower than single ones. Imagine data fragmented on different platters...
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#31
btarunr
Editor & Senior Moderator
Prima.VeraYeah. Actually, multi platerrs HDD are slower than single ones. Imagine data fragmented on different platters...
In theory, data interleaved across multiple platters is accessed faster.
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#32
Aquinus
Resident Wat-man
Prima.VeraYeah. Actually, multi platerrs HDD are slower than single ones. Imagine data fragmented on different platters...
That is why defrag exists. :slap: Actually multi-platter drives read sequential data better because it can read from more platters at once. It doesn't scale perfectly linearly but pretty close. For any hard drive at the same speed (7200rpm, 5400rpms, etc.) more platters with the same density will generally give you better performance. Increasing platter density while maintaining the same speed will also improve performance. Both cases assume the controller on the hard drive isn't bottlenecked.
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