Seagate Eliminates Multiple Drive Needs

Until recently, the only way to give a system half a terabyte of storage space was to install multiple drives. But using multiple drives increases cost, complexity and build time. Fortunately, Seagate Technology has come to the rescue with its new Barracuda 7200.9, a 500-Gbyte Serial ATA (SATA) drive with a fast 3-Gbps throughput.

SATA 2.5 drives ideally meet the cost-per-gigabyte requirements for low-cost servers and PCs of all types, including those used for gaming, digital video editing, CAD/CAM and data analysis.

The Barracuda 7200.9 hard drive also features Native Command Queuing and Hyper-Threading. The NCQ technology enables command reordering, first-party direct memory access and interrupt aggregation to boost performance for applications that are heavily transactional.

Seagate soon will make nearline versions of the 500-Gbyte drive available to the channel. Based on the same technology and platform as the Barracuda 7200.9, Seagate&'s 500-Gbyte nearline drive has revised firmware optimized for nearline workloads, giving it a reliability specification of 1 million hours MTBF. Nearline storage systems house information that must always be available and in an economical manner. The reading of nearline data is highly random in nature, forcing drive heads to move rapidly and repeatedly across a disk. Therefore, nearline drives are beefed up to handle continuous random reads and writes with 24x7 operation.

Seagate&'s 500-Gbyte drives install like any other, and the drives automatically configure themselves to operate at the new 3-Gbps specification or for legacy 1.5-Gbps SATA systems.

Seagate&'s 500-Gbyte Barracuda 7200.9 is priced at $432. The nearline version won&'t be officially announced for channel availability until January 2006, and prices haven&'t been set. All of Seagate&'s drives are backed by a five-year warranty.