Seagate Introduces New 1TB-Per-Platter Barracuda, Solid State Hybrid Version Coming
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 1, 2011 8:00 AM ESTYesterday Seagate had three members of its Barracuda family of 3.5" hard drives: the Barracuda Green, Barracuda, and Barracuda XT. Today, all three lines are being folded under the Barracuda name. The Barracuda Green drives will cease production in February 2012. The Barracuda XT, Seagate's flagship 3.5" drive, will eventually be replaced by a solid state Hybrid drive at some point in the future. Until then, if you want a 3.5" hard drive from Seagate - it'll just be called a Barracuda.
The new Barracuda lineup is top-to-bottom 7200RPM. Seagate makes up for the extra power required to spin at 7200RPM (vs 5900RPM for the Green drives) by moving to 1TB platters and a faster cache. Increasing platter density has been the preferred route of increasing performance in hard drives over the past decade, causing spindle speeds to stagnate but sequential transfer rates to increase steadily. The new 1TB-per-platter Barracuda disks are no exception. Despite not carrying the XT label, the new 3TB drive is capable of noticeably higher sequential read/write speeds compared to the outgoing Barracuda XT.
Seagate also updated the controller (now built on a 40nm process) and DRAM (now up to 64MB of DDR2) on the new Barracuda line. The 1TB platter drives are available in 1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB and 3TB capacities. Their prices and model numbers are below:
| Seagate's 1TB-per-platter Barracuda Lineup | ||||
| Model Number | Capacity | MSRP | ||
| ST3000DM001 | 3TB | $179.99 | ||
| ST2000DM001 | 2TB | $105.99 | ||
| ST1500DM001 | 1.5TB | $83.99 | ||
| ST1000DM003 | 1TB | $71.99 | ||
We'll have a full review of the new 3TB flagship drive later today.
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Taft12 - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Production of sub-1TB platters isn't being shut off like a faucet. Those platters gotta go somewhere!ViRGE - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
It seems to me that if they're moving exclusively to 2TB drives, they're ceding the low cost market to Samsung and Western Digital. Their 5K RPM drives have been a big hit in the home server space as the high capacities for the price were well worth the lower performance. Unless Seagate has a trick up their sleeves, they won't be able to price their drives competitively with that market segment.Roland00Address - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Samsung HDD unit was bought out by Seagate in April, also Seagate and Samsung agreed to cross license technologies and that Seagate will get its nand from Samsung for its hybrid drives..Guspaz - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
We have five platter drives. We have 1TB per platter densities. Why don't we have 5TB drives?James5mith - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
We have 4TB drives. Why aren't you buying them?aranyagag - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Kindly do name the manufacturer & the model number of a publicly available 4 TB bare drive.Golgatha - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAgent-GoFlex-Ext...Nihility - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
failQapa - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Because SSDs is what matter ;)HDDs... well, I just need some for "slow storage", so I don't really care that much anymore.
So, Anand any news on, when do you post a review of the OCZ Octane?
(They were supposed to be out today...)
kyuu - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Yes please!