In an amazing feat of data density, Seagate has once again made a leap to the next level of storage technology unveiling 1 Terabyte per platter drives. WIth an areal density of 625 Gigabytes per square inch, Seagate claims the new drives are capable of storing “virtually countless hours of digital music,” and “1,500 video games.”
The move to 1TB per platter drives is an especially important step for high capacity drives. Current 1TB+ drives are using two 500 GB platters, while current 3TB drives are using either four 750 GB platters in the form of the WD Caviar Green 3 TB that PC Perspective has reviewed here, or the five 600 GB platters. With Seagate’s new technology, they will be able to cut the number of platters in their highest capacity 3 TB drives almost in half. By moving from five platters to three, their drives will run cooler, faster, and with less power draw. Improved areal density also reduces the number of moving parts, and thus decreases the points of failure, even with the inclusion of newer and more sensitive read heads.
The place in the market where this new technology will make the most noticeable difference is in the mobile segment. With just a single platter, mobile users will have close to 1.5 terabytes of internal storage in a two platter drive, or 750 GB in a one platter drive while using less power and being capable of faster reads. This means that road warriors will be able to keep more of their files with them without reducing battery life compared to the current crop of mobile hard drives.
Unfortunately, mobile users will have to wait, as Seagate has only announced 3.5” desktop and external drives. These drives will be branded under both the Seagate Barracuda XT and GoFlex lines respectively.
For desktop users, they can currently expect capacities ranging from 1TB to 3TB drives. In a RAID array, these new lower power and potentially faster drives would make for a great addition to an HD video editing rig. Call me crazy, but I’m going to hold onto my old school 320 GB Seagate drives until I can jump straight to 4 TB. So, where’s my 4 platter, 4TB drive Seagate?
Are you excited about this new platter technology? What would you do with 3 terabytes of storage?
I’m a Western Digital fan
I’m a Western Digital fan boy, but if Seagate comes out with a 4TB drive I might have to move to them. I run a WHS were i store all my Bluray and DVD movies (compressed). After 400 DVDs and 100 blurays 4TB gets used up. I’ve been looking at the 3TB drives. I would like to see these out now, i would most likely buy. Hoping for larger than 3TB tho.
Yep, I’m waiting for at least
Yep, I’m waiting for at least 4TB drives before I upgrade. I’m interested to see what WD and Samsung will have to counter this Seagate tech! 😀
Been waiting for the 4TB, 1
Been waiting for the 4TB, 1 per platter HDs as well. My 5900rpm “green” Hitachi 2TB is always noticably faster than my WD 1TB Black FALS when loading games and reading big files like ISOs. This is because it has twice the density. It only loses when seeking random small files but since those files are small and transfers instantly anyways, it unimportant. Density is more important than RPM nowadays and these newer 4 platter, 4 TB drives will be the ones to get. I just hope they have more cache on them. We should be at 4GB of cache or at least 2GB at a ratio of at least 1:1000. Back when we had 30GB Hard drives ten years ago, the cache was already at 32Megabytes.