Seagate Constellation - World’s Highest Capacity and Power- Efficient SED Hard Drives

Seagate (NASDAQ:STX) today introduced its Constellation™ family of new enterprise storage solutions for Tier-2 nearline storage applications. The two new drive models, the 2.5-inch Constellation and the 3.5-inch Constellation ES hard drives, include a combination of features that enable high capacities, increased power efficiency, enterprise-class reliability, and data security. Both drives also include PowerChoice™ from Seagate, which decreases power consumption by up to 54% for record power savings in enterprise environments.

The need for greater storage capacity will continue to expand in multiple directions and dimensions, but there will be an increasing scrutiny of all storage system purchases, with an eye to decreasing power consumption, footprint, and cost per GB in unprecedented ways

said John Monroe, a research vice president at Gartner

Will it Affect Performance?

He said,

Performance will not be ignored, but a flexible balance of capacity, cost per GB, power and speed will become more crucial in fulfilling end-user storage demands at varied price points.

Constellation

The Constellation 2.5-inch hard drive is offered in capacities of 160GB and 500GB with both 3 Gbps SATA and new SAS 2.0 interface running at 6Gb/s speeds. As the first SAS 2.0 nearline drive, the Constellation hard drive enables larger external storage topologies, 100% faster data throughput and higher signal strength over greater distances – dramatically increasing storage scalability. The Constellation family will begin shipping this quarter.

Constellation ES

The 3.5-inch Constellation ES hard drive will be available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities, and with an enterprise-class SAS interface as well as a SATA version, and provides best-in-class capacity and performance. As the world’s only 7200-rpm 3.5-inch hard drive providing up to 2TB of storage, the record-setting capacity of Constellation ES hard drives are ideal for 3.5-inch based external storage architectures. With Constellation ES hard drives, customers don’t have to sacrifice performance in order to gain the highest capacities. The Constellation ES hard drive will ship in calendar Q3.

Technology Behind Constellation

With Seagate’s innovative PowerChoice technology, both Constellation hard drive models deliver the highest power-reduction savings ever offered in an enterprise-class HDD, and provide flexible, user-manageable options to deliver power savings without sacrificing performance, data integrity, or reliability. In addition, the Constellation family of drives are backed with field-proven, enterprise-grade reliability and rated at a full 1.2 million hours MTBF.

Delivering on Seagate’s commitment to add security features throughout its product portfolio, the Constellation family of drives are offered with optional self-encrypting drive (SED) technology and provide government-grade data security through the drive’s life cycle. SED technology makes drive retirement and disposal easy by eliminating the need for the numerous manual processes involved which are often incomplete, complex, expensive, or prone to error. For critical information that must remain secure, and because all systems are eventually retired, whether being relocated, re-purposed, or disposed of, the information on a Constellation SED hard drive remains AES-safe.

Conclusion

It actually speaks volume about the next gen enterprise hard drives. Seagate has already been very innovative about bringing out the best. Here too, we shall wait to witness something very unique.

[Source: Seagate Press Release ]