Seagate held a special meeting yesterday where they presented at least two different soon to be introduced products. First there was a notebook hybrid hard drive that employs a 256MB flash memory buffer to cache data during normal use. The data come from a conventional 160GB 2.5 inch platter setup spinning at 5400rpm. Seagate officials said it won't digg into SSD (Solid State Disk) technology because the drives would be too expensive compared to present technology. When the buffer stored all the data the whole system needs in order to run the platters will come to rest and will spin up only when additional data is needed. The use of hybrid drives obviously offers great benefits, among them low access times, decreased power consumption and improved reliability.
The chaps from Chilehardware who attended the show also got more information regarding Seagate's 1TB (1 terabyte equals 1000GB) hard disk solution. By the end of April the 7200.11 Series will be in stores. All models out of this series feature a speed of 7200rpm, SATA II with NCQ (Native Command Qeueing) and 16MB cache. Thanks to the use of Seagate's advanced perpendicular recording efforts the aforementioned 1TB top model only needs 4 platters to store that amount of data. Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 1000GB however needs 5 platters which in general needs a stronger motor and bearings which is in turn more expensive to produce.