Tuesday, April 8th 2008

Seagate Delivers World's First 1TB Drive with SAS Interface

Seagate today announced it has begun worldwide shipment of its 1 terabyte (TB) enterprise-class Barracuda ES.2 hard drives with a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface. Applications addressing rich media content and collaborative applications like email can benefit from the average 135% performance boost over SATA-interface drives along with robust enterprise features and native compatibility.

"The explosion of content in enterprise environments is driving the need for faster data access and bandwidth that Seagate's 1TB Barracuda ES.2 drives can deliver with a SAS interface," said Sherman Black, Seagate senior vice president and general manager, Seagate Enterprise Compute Business. "SAS dual-port capability with redundancy, improved performance and data integrity make this drive the perfect low-cost/GB enterprise-ready drive for our customers."

SAS also enables greater system-design and integration flexibility for solution providers who are eager to offer even greater value options to their customers. "The higher performance and inherently lower total cost of ownership (TCO) make Barracuda ES.2 drives with SAS a perfect choice for many of our customers," said Joe Cousins, vice president, Marketing at Bell Microproducts. "With the added enterprise features found within SAS all merging into a lower-cost package, we anticipate our customers will be very interested in building and deploying SAS-based systems with Seagate drives."

With the introduction of the Barracuda ES.2 drive, Seagate is first to provide customers with a SAS interface option in addition to its SATA model, which began shipping last year. For major system providers including HP, SAS offers greater levels of data integrity and performance for business-critical and nearline enterprise environments.

"As a leader in the enterprise, HP ProLiant servers and storage technologies help customers to manage their datacenter infrastructure with confidence," said Ron Noblett, vice president, Industry Standard Servers, HP. "We're pleased to align with Seagate for their hard drive expertise as the new SAS 1TB drive is added to the HP portfolio of Midline drives. These drives will provide the 'pennies per GB economics' of SATA Midline with additional performance as well as the dual port capability our external storage customers demand."

The Barracuda ES.2 hard drive with SAS is optimized for business-critical and nearline enterprise storage environments that demand native enterprise host compatibility. This means no SATA interposer card costs and complexity, along with all the advantages including dual-port, full duplex capability and a host of enterprise class features for high system-level performance and reliability.

Seagate's PowerTrim technology is integrated into the Barracuda ES.2 drive family and dynamically manages drive power consumption at all levels of activity. With PowerTrim technology, the Barracuda ES.2 drive addresses the IT dilemma facing energy-constrained data centers by delivering a 20% reduction in overall drive power consumption and a best-in-class 55% reduction in watts-per-gigabyte. And moving to SAS gives customers up to 38% improvement in IOPs-per-Watt over SATA.

The Barracuda ES.2 drive family's robust features stand out in performance, reliability, capacity, and energy efficiency. Among them is its new RVFF (Rotational Vibration Feed Forward) system, designed to sustain performance in densely-packed multi-drive systems. The Barracuda ES.2 drive also boosts reliability with an industry-best unrecoverable error rate that is 10 times better than desktop class drives and a 1.2 million hour Mean Time Between Failure at full 24 x 7 data availability.

The Barracuda ES.2 drive family operates at 7,200-rpm spin speeds, delivers average seek times of 8.5ms, and delivers up to 1TB of capacity with other models available in 500GB and 750GB. It includes Seagate's industry-leading five-year limited warranty.
Source: Seagate
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8 Comments on Seagate Delivers World's First 1TB Drive with SAS Interface

#1
DanishDevil
Oh damn! Those SAS controllers are looking more appealing every day...

I wonder why no high-end motherboards have built in SAS controllers? That would be sweet.
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#2
francis511
Just wondering what that would cost ?
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#3
Ripper3
Serial-Attached-SCSI. Hmmm, I was actually looking at some nice 10,000RPM 2.5" SAS drives, one was 137GB, but it was quite cheap, but the controller was bloody expensive.
Yeah, basically, the name of the technology behind it should give you a hint as to why it would not be on mainstream and even overclocker's motherboards. All the SCSI drives I've ever seen, along with controllers have been pretty expensive, and almost always restricted to workstations and servers, but I could be wrong, and knowing me, I probably am, heh.
Good thing is, it uses regular SATA cables to connect up the drive, so AFAIK, you can connect up SATA drives to SAS controllers, but not the other way around for some reason.

I don't really see how email would benefit from a fast, large SAS drive, or at least, any more so than it would benefit from any large, fast SATA drive.
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#5
Ripper3
Seems to have motherboard compatibility rather than just general compatibility, so maybe it's made only for those motherboards. I dunno, but yeah, it is pretty cheap. Still, until they start integrating SAS controllers on motherboards, prices will likely still stay around or over the $100 mark, which is a bit expensive for most people, considering they can just get a regular motherboard for $100 that supports SATA and IDE hard drives anyhow.
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#6
Steevo
Probably about $1400 or a little better per drive.
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#7
Ripper3
*faints*
Frankly, for the average consumer, the Samsung F1 1TB, or the other 1TB drives as well will be just fine, running more than fast enough, and frankly, a whole lot cheaper than that. Not to mention you'd have to buy the controller, and that would be an extra source of heat, and use more power.
Still, always nice to think of what we COULD run, eh.
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#8
WarEagleAU
Bird of Prey
You can bet its a decent price, more than a SATA 1tb drive.
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