Introducing Seagate's 7200.9: The New Generation
by Purav Sanghani on October 10, 2005 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Seagate's Upcoming Offerings
Perpendicular recording has been in the news recently, with Toshiba bringing to the market the first drive utilizing the technology. We asked Seagate how soon it would bring a product using the new recording method to the desktop and notebook market. Back in June, Seagate introduced the 160GB Momentus 5400.3 notebook drive, the highest capacity notebook drive to date, achieved by using perpendicular recording and higher density platters for the increased disk space. The 160GB version of the 5400.3 will use two 80GB platters in combination with 4 heads to achieve this capacity. The 5400.3 line will offer 40GB, 60GB, 80GB, and 120GB as well with an 8MB cache and both PATA and SATA 1.5Gb/sec transfer rate with Native Command Queuing.
Another offering that we are looking forward to is the Momentus with FDE (Full Disc Encryption) technology. This implements a hardware-based encryption method to protect the contents on a lost or stolen drive. Since the encryption is hardware-based, there is virtually no chance of breaking into a locked volume, and in cases where the drive is to be disposed, the Disc Erase feature will completely wipe the platters clean of any sensitive data. The Momentus 5400 FDE line will come in 40GB, 60GB, 80GB, 100GB, and 120GB sizes. It will feature an 8MB cache and looks like it will be offered only in the PATA flavor - at least initially.
Perpendicular recording has been in the news recently, with Toshiba bringing to the market the first drive utilizing the technology. We asked Seagate how soon it would bring a product using the new recording method to the desktop and notebook market. Back in June, Seagate introduced the 160GB Momentus 5400.3 notebook drive, the highest capacity notebook drive to date, achieved by using perpendicular recording and higher density platters for the increased disk space. The 160GB version of the 5400.3 will use two 80GB platters in combination with 4 heads to achieve this capacity. The 5400.3 line will offer 40GB, 60GB, 80GB, and 120GB as well with an 8MB cache and both PATA and SATA 1.5Gb/sec transfer rate with Native Command Queuing.
Another offering that we are looking forward to is the Momentus with FDE (Full Disc Encryption) technology. This implements a hardware-based encryption method to protect the contents on a lost or stolen drive. Since the encryption is hardware-based, there is virtually no chance of breaking into a locked volume, and in cases where the drive is to be disposed, the Disc Erase feature will completely wipe the platters clean of any sensitive data. The Momentus 5400 FDE line will come in 40GB, 60GB, 80GB, 100GB, and 120GB sizes. It will feature an 8MB cache and looks like it will be offered only in the PATA flavor - at least initially.
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JarredWalton - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link
The tech to run 160GB platters is new. Right now, they 160GB platter is only being used in the 80GB and 160GB drives, which is telling. I would have thought a 240GB and 320GB would also use the new platters, but that's probably a future product.coldpower27 - Tuesday, October 11, 2005 - link
Also you got to not that Seagate may not want to dilute thier product line with intermidates such as 240GB & 320GB drives. Since noe one has made 240GB drives and only WD to my knowledge has 320GB drives.With 200GB to 250GB, & 300 to 400GB.
Marlin1975 - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link
but what about performance? The slowwest part of a system is the hard drive. I need speed, not 500gigs that only a few will really use daily. I have a pile of shows and movies but that is what DVD's are for. I need speed to make my system run faster. I guess I will stick with my 15K 36gig master boot drive and another one for backup.Maybe hard drive makers will get it one day. Seems WD is the only one to address that for desktops so far?
xsilver - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link
is there some kind of raid array that will allow 3,5,10 drives to be merged as one?seek times wouldnt improve but transfer rates might if the drives could intelligently split up singular file transfers into chunks for each drive... or is that some crazy idea i just dreamed up? ;) (4x 200gb drives stiped would be relativly cost effective compared to 4x or more raptors)
also 16mb buffers seem a bit low for the latest gen drives, 32/64 would be nice for the 300-500gb models.
and I think large cheap drives is where the moneys at now, cant blame seagate for attacking that front.
joex444 - Tuesday, October 11, 2005 - link
it's a dream. you can't merge RAID arrays.However, RAID50 exists. Now, this might be backwards, but: 6 drives. Make RAID5 array w/ 3 drives; make another RAID5 array w/ other 3 drives; make a RAID0 array with 2 RAID5 arrays. So, if you wrote 4 blocks of data, 2 go to RAID5-A, 2 go to RAID5-B.
As far as fault protection, if one drive goes, it's ok. If two drives go it matters from which RAID5 array. From the same array, the whole thing is gone, from different arrays, it's no problem. 3 drives is certain doom, though.
ceefka - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link
More seems tempting. The test with tha 250GB Maxtor showed that streaming likes big buffers.
What kind of RAM is that buffer anyway? Is it ordinairy SDRAM? What would a buffersize > 16MB do? Is there a theoretical maximum and/or sweet spot in relation to the read/write capacity?
xsilver - Tuesday, October 11, 2005 - link
I think hdd's use a one chip ram solution, around 5ns is commonthe thing you have to note is that a normal ram is an 8 chip solution for single sided ram
that's why 64mb is probably the highest they could go economically
and isnt the problem with using flash ram in a hybid the problem of lifespan? nand flash rates at 1 million writes/reads as mtbf? thats probably not enough for a hdd?
Xenoterranos - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link
If you have a ton of HUMONGO filed, say, the complete season of everything volumes 1-100, in Divx, partition the drive in NTFS with a 16mb allocation size, and your data will FLY, especially if the allocation size matches the buffer (or am I spouting off crackpot science?)geoff2k - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link
Googling ST3300622AS already gets a few hits, but no one appears to have any in stock -- when can we expect these at retailers?(Prices so far for the 300 GB SATA are 243 CAD$, 211 US$, 203 US$).
cryptonomicon - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link
"as you cab guess from the name, "first paragraph