From 1 Inch to 500 Gbytes: Seagate Unveils Wide Range Of New Drives

On the enterprise side, the company introduced the NL35 series, which includes a 500-Gbyte drive with a Fibre Channel interface aimed at the near-line storage market for such applications as disk-to-disk backups, virtual tape backup and recovery, image and document management, and lower-tiered storage of regulatory compliance or other business data, company executives said. The new drives are expected to be available in the fourth quarter.

The company also introduced the Cheetah 15K.4 series of hard drives. With capacities of 36 Gbytes, 73 Gbytes and 147 Gbytes, the drives offer 15,000 RPM performance and a mean time between failure (MTBF) rating of 1.4 million hours. Fibre Channel and Ultra320 SCSI versions are expected next quarter, while a SATA drive with a serial-attached SCSI (SAS) interface is expected in the fourth quarter.

Seagate also increased the capacity of its 3.5-inch, 10,000-rpm hard drives with the Cheetah 10K.7 drives. They are expected to come in capacities of 36 Gbytes, 146 Gbytes and 300 Gbytes and have a MTBF rating of 1.4 million hours, company executives said. Shipments are expected to start next quarter.

For desktop PCs, Seagate introduced the Barracuda 7200.8 drives with capacity of up to 400 Gbytes, a cache of up to 16 Mbytes, a 7,200-rpm spin speed, an 8.0-millisecond average seek time, and a choice of Ultra ATA or SATA interface.

Seagate also rolled out a 2.5-Gbyte and a 5.0-Gbyte external hard drive built into an external portable housing about the size of a USB thumb drive, as well as an external 2.5-inch portable hard drive with capacity of up to 100 Gbytes and USB interface. A new portable 400-Gbyte external hard drive in an enclosure allows multiple units to be stacked on top of each other.

For notebook PCs, Seagate introduced the Momentus 7200.1. a 2.5-inch mobile drive with 7,200-rpm spin speed and capacity of up to 100 Gbytes. It is expected to be available with SATA and Ultra ATA interfaces.

The company also introduced the Momentus 5400.2 drive, with a 100-Gbyte capacity in a 2.5-inch form factor and 5,400-rpm spin speed.

For consumer applications, Seagate introduced its first 1-inch hard drive. The ST1 series drive is available in 2.5-Gbyte and 5-Gbyte capacities and is mainly targeted at portable music players.

Also new is the DB35 hard drive, a 400-Gbyte model for digital video recorder applications. It can deliver up to 10 simultaneous streams of TV, company executives said.