Seagate has pushed one step closer to the terabyte hard drive with a new 3.5-inch drive that holds up to 750 gigabytes.
The Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company has started to ship its Barracuda 7200.10 line of hard drives to computer manufacturers. The drive features platters that store data in vertical columns, which allow more information to be stored in a given space on the hard-drive platter.
As a result, the top end of the Barracuda line, designed for the PC and workstation market, can hold up to 750GB--a record, according to Seagate (to date, Seagate and Hitachi have sold drives that top out at 500GB). The 750GB drive costs $590. Other Barracuda 7200.10 drives range in density from 500GB to 200GB. The entry-level model sells for $108.
"We don't charge a premium for perpendicular," said Joni Clark, product marketing manager.
The drive was launched about a month ahead of schedule because of better-than-expected yields in manufacturing.
Although the record likely won't last long in the rapidly evolving hard-drive business, it reflects the success Seagate has had over its competitors in bringing perpendicular technology to market. Very few of Seagate's drives incorporate the technology, but the company has begun to release the drives at a fairly regular clip.
The Barracuda 7200.10 is the company's fifth perpendicular drive.
A 750GB drive could hold the same amount of data as 750 pickup trucks loaded with books, or the amount of data contained in books produced from 37,500 trees, according to the famed How Much Information study from the University of California, Berkeley. Still, demand for storage is expected to grow with the proliferation of high definition television. Some companies already sell storage appliances with a terabyte of storage.
Although the technology continually advances, the hard-drive market remains a tough neighborhood to live in. The hard-drive market will increase 18 percent, from 380 million in 2005 to 450 million drives in 2006, according to research firm TrendFocus. Still, many companies struggle to turn a profit. Seagate, for instance, is acquiring former competitor Maxtor, which recently announced layoffs and financial losses.
Apart from the "obvious" solution of buying 2 of the 750GB drives and copying all your data from one to the other regularly (e.g. rsync or whatever), how do you "properly" back up 750GB of data if you're a home user?
As far as I know, this far exceeds the capacity of any single-tape or single-optical-disc out there, so unless you've got a tape or disc jukebox (which is generally outside the price range affordable by a home user), you're stuffed...
Is the home user who cannot afford backup going to buy a 750 gig drive? Of course the person who needs this drive will also buy another for backup, or rely on another solution, such as a dual enclosure RAID for backup. You can buy two 300 GB drives for under $100 each with rebate, and a dual RAID enclosure for a bit over $100. That only yields 600 GBs, but that shows how cheap storage can be.
Get two or more and RAID 'em. VXA tape autoloader for backup at under $2,000 also works to backup 800GB to 1.6TB (compressed). But why not just get four of the little puppies, go RAID-5 and be the first geek on the block with 2.1 TB of ready access storage. But, you still might want that tape backup just because things that move, break.
You would think the audience of C|NET would be sophisticated enough to skip the infantile analogies for data storage; most readers are probably familiar with the concept of a "gigabyte".
But apparently the author is aiming this story squarely at the "Redneck Retard" demographic and thus felt compelled to use the most stupid analogy ever employed to describe HD storage space...
I've always been impressed with Seagate since the days when SCSI was king.
It's good to see that a company I choose over others is pushing the bar. Hopefully they'll fix the issues with maxtor (whom I had no faith in after several failing drives).
As for storage technology in general, they'll take it as far as they go then they'll switch to something else.
it's nice to know i'm not the only one that thinks maxtor sucks and that seagate is the best thing since the computer mouse(ok, maybe not that great). But I have 10+ year old HDDs from seagate that have daily use and have no disk errors yet, and I had a 1 month old maxtor drive that died on me...
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no BOOSTING Drive Storage. Super-Paramagnetic Limit will be reached.
There better be something colossal in the wings coming online.
forsee perpendicular technology?
As far as I know, this far exceeds the capacity of any single-tape or single-optical-disc out there, so unless you've got a tape or disc jukebox (which is generally outside the price range affordable by a home user), you're stuffed...
drive? Of course the person who needs this drive will also buy
another for backup, or rely on another solution, such as a dual
enclosure RAID for backup. You can buy two 300 GB drives for
under $100 each with rebate, and a dual RAID enclosure for a bit
over $100. That only yields 600 GBs, but that shows how cheap
storage can be.
But apparently the author is aiming this story squarely at the "Redneck Retard" demographic and thus felt compelled to use the most stupid analogy ever employed to describe HD storage space...
SCSI was king.
It's good to see that a company I choose over others is pushing
the bar. Hopefully they'll fix the issues with maxtor (whom I had
no faith in after several failing drives).
As for storage technology in general, they'll take it as far as they
go then they'll switch to something else.