Seagate Readies its First SATA 6 Gbps Hard Drive

[btarunr]

Hard drive specialist Seagate is readying its first line of performance hard drives to feature the new SATA 6 Gb/s interface, under the banner Barracuda XT. Some of the first in this family include 2 TB drives made with 500 GB platters, with spindle speeds of 7200 rpm. The drives will feature 64 MB caches, and are expected to sustain transfer rates of 140 MB/s. These drives are expected to have rated MTBF at 750,000 hours and are backed by 5 year company warranty.

The Seagate Barracuda XT faces competition from WD Caviar Black 2 TB, even as the latter features the SATA 3 Gb/s interface. The contribution of the interface bandwidth to the actual performance remains largely to be seen, although developments in the fields of solid-state drives show them to have a bright future with the SATA 6 Gb/s interface. The Seagate Barracuda XT is expected to cost around US $300, and will start shipping later this week.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[wiak]

Seagate Readies its First SATA 3 Gbps Hard Drive

 

[REVHEAD]

140 MB/s

not exactly groundbreaking, you can acheive this on a Sata 2.0 interface.

 

[Solaris17]

not exactly groundbreaking, you can acheive this on a Sata 2.0 interface.

and though it is acheivable it is not the base line.

 

[Cheeseball]

Seagate Readies its First SATA 3 Gbps Hard Drive

 

[Roph]

Why the posting "3Gbps" and then thanking? Am I missing something? =o

And it's nice to see them back with a 5 year warranty on these

 

[Fishymachine]

Marketing schemes...:shadedshu and to thing you elect people to represent and protect us.
It is impractical to make a 300MB(3Gb)ps mechanical hard drive.Sata 6gig is for SSD's

 

[lemonadesoda]

In theory, you CAN double the performance of a HDD. But it becomes more expensive to build/manufacture and calibrate. How to do it?

>> Build a drive with TWO head arms 180° opposite from each other, so there are now TWO heads on each platter surface. You RAID 0 the heads. The alternative it so have just one arm, but with two heads at the end, offset by a small amount.

To fit the double arm system in a 3.5" drive, you would need to reduce the size of the platters somewhat. Not as small as a 2.5" drive, probably somewhere in between.

Capacity would go down a bit, but performance would double, and seek times would improve in the double-arm approach (you would constrain each head arm to use only half of the disk, so there would be less head movement and seek time for each arm), but remain the same in the double-head approach.

There are ways of doing it... but the question is are the economics right for the market? Possibly it will be the only way to keep HDDs competitive against SSDs.

 

[inferKNOX]

With how Samsung has been surging, I thought they'd be the first ones to present this.
I wonder if they're (Samsung) trying to make their new 500GB platters work blazing fast then put them into the 6Gb/s bracket so that they don't get the, "What's the speed increase?" complaint that everyone is giving.

I also wonder what the price of the 1GB version will be from each company?

 

[Mussels]

its good to see the standard pick up, although i'd rather see it on SSD's.

 

[newtekie1]

Sweet, so we can see sustaind transfer rates that don't even max out SATA 1.5Gbps... why do hard drives need SATA 6Gbps?

 

[Solaris17]

Sweet, so we can see sustaind transfer rates that don't even max out SATA 1.5Gbps... why do hard drives need SATA 6Gbps?

because with the introduction of a biger number we can pretty much garentee that now the HDD's will start doing tricks? god try to understand the article plz

 

[inferKNOX]

Why the posting "3Gbps" and then thanking? Am I missing something? =o

And it's nice to see them back with a 5 year warranty on these

They're trying to bring attention to the fact that the full bandwidth of the 3Gb/s has not been maxed, nevermind needing 6Gb/s.
I agree, but think it's better to remove the bottleneck before it arises.
Lol, and think about it everyone... the storage side of the news has been really lacking, so this gives them a story, ROFL!

 

[wiak]

not exactly groundbreaking, you can acheive this on a Sata 2.0 interface.

Samsung Spinpoint F3 does that on 3Gbps

 

[Mussels]

i suppose the main point of this is that they test it on a mechanical drive and work out any bandwidth inhibiting kinks in the controller, before moving it to their SSD lineup (when they make one )

 

[PP Mguire]

i suppose the main point of this is that they test it on a mechanical drive and work out any bandwidth inhibiting kinks in the controller, before moving it to their SSD lineup (when they make one )

I was just about to say something like that. Seagate already makes good HDs, they should leave those on sata 300 and just make SSDs now. The more SSDs the cheaper they will become. And SSDs have to be cheaper to produce than HDDs.

 

[inferKNOX]

I agree that HDDs should be left to 3Gb/s & SSDs be the focus for the 6Gb/s.

 

[thebeephaha]

Everyone needs to stop bitching.

It is a technological step forward. Doesn't matter if the drives actually use it or not. It just starts to force the interface to become mainstream quicker.

 

[PP Mguire]

Seagate should release SSDs to make that mainstream faster

 

[TheLaughingMan]

I am looking forward to Rectangular Hard Disk Drives in the next few years. RHD will be the real competition for SSD's and it is good to see Seagate is working on improving IO for HDD which will help advance both RHD's and SSD's in the future.

Though I will be sticking to getting a sustained throughput of 84 MB/s on a 5400 RPM Sammy F3.

 

[PP Mguire]

I think ill stick with fast SSDs and Seagate awesome big drives for storage.

 

[Zubasa]

Everyone needs to stop bitching.

It is a technological step forward. Doesn't matter if the drives actually use it or not. It just starts to force the interface to become mainstream quicker.

If this "technological step forward" means polluting the world with useless junk then no thanks.
What they really should do is force SSDs to mainsteam, not $300 HDDs that can't even utilize the original SATA 1.5Gb/s.

 

[Kantastic]

I am looking forward to Rectangular Hard Disk Drives in the next few years. RHD will be the real competition for SSD's and it is good to see Seagate is working on improving IO for HDD which will help advance both RHD's and SSD's in the future.

Though I will be sticking to getting a sustained throughput of 84 MB/s on a 5400 RPM Sammy F3.

Unfortunately by the time RHD's are ready to be released, SSD's would have gone mainstream unless RHD's are released a lot sooner than expected.

 

[lemonadesoda]

In theory you could combine the "best" of HDD and RHD. That is... have a spinning disk with a FIXED ARM... that has multiple heads on it. Then there is no head seek time... there is a head for each track on the HDD. There would be no seek noise or clattering either.

They would be unbelievably fast because you would RAID0 across all the heads... if there were 512 heads then you could get 64 way RAID or better. (cant do them ALL at the same time due to magnetic interference)

However, it would be a big change in how they are made... and I would imagine wiring multiple heads would be expensive... and the processing power to handle that data trhoughput would have to be an order of magnitude higher than today. But doable. They would probably also be more shock tolerant... since MOST HDD damage is due to arm moving the wrong way and folding the heads over.

 

[TheLaughingMan]

In theory you could combine the "best" of HDD and RHD. That is... have a spinning disk with a FIXED ARM... that has multiple heads on it. Then there is no head seek time... there is a head for each track on the HDD. There would be no seek noise or clattering either.

They would be unbelievably fast because you would RAID0 across all the heads... if there were 512 heads then you could get 64 way RAID or better. (cant do them ALL at the same time due to magnetic interference)

However, it would be a big change in how they are made... and I would imagine wiring multiple heads would be expensive... and the processing power to handle that data trhoughput would have to be an order of magnitude higher than today. But doable. They would probably also be more shock tolerant... since MOST HDD damage is due to arm moving the wrong way and folding the heads over.

Well that is almost exactly what a RHD is suppose to be minus the RAID. A single dual sided platter, multiple heads (32 and 64 being tested as of now), with fixed arms. Each head gets a sector and movement of the drive is limited to a very small area resulting in very low or no seek time. Honestly, from the little I know, there is really nothing but testing for issues like the one you mention and manufacturing concerns in their way. It is possible they could be released next year.