Seagate Breaks Areal Density Barrier, Unveils First HDD with 1 TB per Platter

[btarunr]

Seagate, the leader in hard drives and storage solutions, today unveiled the world's first 3.5-inch hard drive featuring 1TB of storage capacity per disk platter, breaking the 1TB areal density barrier to help meet explosive worldwide demand for digital content storage in both the home and the office.

Seagate's GoFlex Desk products are the first to feature the new hard drive, delivering storage capacities of up to 3TB and an areal density of 625 Gigabits per square inch, the industry's highest. Seagate is on track to ship its flagship 3.5-inch Barracuda desktop hard drive with 3TBs of storage on 3 disk platters - enough capacity to store up to 120 high-definition movies, 1,500 video games, thousands of photos or virtually countless hours of digital music - to the distribution channel in mid-2011. The drive will also be available in capacities of 2TB, 1.5TB and 1TB.



"Organizations of all sizes and consumers worldwide are amassing digital content at light speed, generating immense demand for storage of digital content of every imaginable kind," said Rocky Pimentel, Seagate Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing. "We remain keenly focused on delivering the storage capacity, speed and manageability our customers need to thrive in an increasingly digital world."

GoFlex Desk external drives are compatible with both the Windows operating system and Mac computers. Each drive includes an NTFS driver for Mac, which allows the drive to store and access files from both Windows and Mac OS X computers without reformatting. The GoFlex Desk external drive's sleek black 3.5-inch design sits either vertically or horizontally to accommodate any desktop environment.

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[entropy13]

Are there even 1,500 games released in the past 10 years? I wonder...

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Why not offer a 5 TB drive with 5 of those platters? What's with the run on 3-4 platter drives lately? Lemme guess, the industry has priced itself out of shipping 5 platter drives.

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

Finally. I've been holding out for 2 platter 2 TB drives. Let's see what WD comes up with and then I'll be replacing both my drives.... well in a perfect world anyways. If these drives turn out like others in the past few years they'll either be prone to massive amounts of noise or horrendous reliability. Let's hope seagate takes a quiet cue from their new samsung tech without the spotty smart data readings.

 

[_JP_]

Are there even 1,500 games released in the past 10 years? I wonder...

3072 GB / 1500 games = 2,048 GB per game. Last time I checked, the 1st DiRT was around ten times that size. So they must be making an average.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

It would hold 66,666 copies of Minecraft (45 MB). XD

 

[micropage7]

i just can say wow
its kinda fast when first hdd touched 1 tera now is 3 tera. sometimes it looks too much for motherboard to handle

 

[caleb]

i just can say wow

Whats so wow about it? That we use the same mechanical technology for more than 30 years and they are still "improving it" lol.
I find it kinda sad we still dont get nice TB size SSD's with a decent price.
I saw this guy in a movie once and he could store other peoples mind in his neural net !

 

[theJesus]

Wake me up when they hit 2tb/platter and sell single platter drives for ~$100. Then I'll buy five or six for a nice RAID 5 or 10 or something like that. Single platter drives are sexy.

 

[wolf]

hard drives are still improving at a fantastic rate imo. good to have such clear definition between super fast read/write drives, and cheap HUGE storage drives.

 

[Deleted member 3]

Whats so wow about it? That we use the same mechanical technology for more than 30 years and they are still "improving it" lol.
I find it kinda sad we still dont get nice TB size SSD's with a decent price.
I saw this guy in a movie once and he could store other peoples mind in his neural net !

I agree, I even saw this documentary about a robot from the future who came to kill some lady. And there was this computer that could think for itself and decided humans should die. Quite interesting.
I'm not sure why we don't get this tech at home.

hard drives are still improving at a fantastic rate imo. good to have such clear definition between super fast read/write drives, and cheap HUGE storage drives.

I disagree, improvements have been slow in the past few years. Though this is because the market for huge multi-TB disks is not that big. Not yet anyway.

 

[micropage7]

Whats so wow about it? That we use the same mechanical technology for more than 30 years and they are still "improving it" lol.

yep with kinda same technology we can push it into now 3 tera. this is what called evolution
although the size is promising, if it fails the pain is kinda 'promising' too, the safest way maybe just place it on raid configuration

 

[blibba]

I struggle to half-fill my 640GB main drive

 

[FreedomEclipse]

I bet that technology originally belonged to samsung....

 

[crazyeyesreaper]

dosent matter who it belonged to the better density will push HDD speed up even higher

just look at the performance numbers of samsungs F4 drives of the 7200rpm variety hitting 155mb/s read write speeds. doubling the density of a 1TB drive from 500gb x2 to 1000gb x1 should give a nice bump in speed id say about 15-25mb/s improvement

The Spinpoint F3s sequential read writes were around 110-115. id expect upping them to single platter would be a nice 130-145 maybe higher so a short stroked drive 1tb reduced to say 700gb per drive x2 in Raid 0 would make for some damn damn nice numbers for mechanical hdds. as that raises the min read write do to cutting off the slowest part of the disk. so average should go up to 125 + the improvement from a single platter upping that to 150+ oh man, cant wait for the new drives and actual performance numbers.

 

[theJesus]

I agree, I even saw this documentary about a robot from the future who came to kill some lady. And there was this computer that could think for itself and decided humans should die. Quite interesting.
I'm not sure why we don't get this tech at home.

Have I ever told you that I love you?

 

[Thefumigator]

Wake me up when they hit 2tb/platter and sell single platter drives for ~$100. Then I'll buy five or six for a nice RAID 5 or 10 or something like that. Single platter drives are sexy.

Wait a second....
Aren't single platter drives slower than multiplatter drives? (considering the platters being the same size in both cases, single and multi).

It makes me think that a drive with 2 x 1TB platters would perform similary to 2x drives of 1TB (single platter) in RAID 0. This is rational, since there's a kind of RAID 0 in between the platters of a multiplatter drive. internally I mean.

But yeah of course improving density will improve performance but I'm not discussing that in this case...

 

[digibucc]

Wait a second....
Aren't single platter drives slower than multiplatter drives?

not in general, no. the platters are linked, but the mechanics still have to read individual platters, in different spots. that slows it all down.

 

[cheesy999]

no, the platters do not work the same as hard drives do in a raid set up, the 1tb f3 is actually slightly slowr then the 500gb f3

 

[Thefumigator]

not in general, no. the platters are linked, but the mechanics still have to read individual platters, in different spots. that slows it all down.

Now I see what that means.

I actually thought the opposite, that more platters would increase speed because the data would have been written sequencially in platter 1, platter 2, platter 3 and then platter 1, platter 2, platter 3 and so on. making lower amount if seekings for each spot as all heads are in the desired spot in that single instant. If you know what I mean (at least it this idea would work faster in sequencial readings)

Now, if they have to read individual platters in different spots, we are doomed. speeds drops. Unless the heads were independent from each other, which are not.

 

[repman244]

I bet that technology originally belonged to samsung....

Yes it did, just google samsung 1TB platter and it's there

 

[newtekie1]

Why not offer a 5 TB drive with 5 of those platters? What's with the run on 3-4 platter drives lately? Lemme guess, the industry has priced itself out of shipping 5 platter drives.

The problem with having more than 3 platters is that they hit the height limit of the drive.

 

[theJesus]

Now I see what that means.

I actually thought the opposite, that more platters would increase speed because the data would have been written sequencially in platter 1, platter 2, platter 3 and then platter 1, platter 2, platter 3 and so on. making lower amount if seekings for each spot as all heads are in the desired spot in that single instant. If you know what I mean (at least it this idea would work faster in sequencial readings)

Now, if they have to read individual platters in different spots, we are doomed. speeds drops. Unless the heads were independent from each other, which are not.

Yeah, I understand the logic you were using, but unfortunately it just doesn't work that way

Regardless, I also want single-platter drives because they're sleek and thin and sexy (and I imagine cooler and quieter)

 

[wiak]

so where is ma 5TB hard drive?
they have the technology
5 platters at 1TB earch = 5TB and 5 platters are max in a 3,5" harddrive

 

[Deleted member 3]

The problem with having more than 3 platters is that they hit the height limit of the drive.

Height limit? I thought full height meant two 5,25" bays. ie four Bigfoots stacked.