Terabyte Disk Drives From Seagate (& Samsung)

Seagate announced availability of Terabyte disk drives at 7200 rpm; separate models targeted for enterprise and consumer desktops. The enterprise drives features serial attached SCSI interface option. Last week Samsung announced terabyte disk drives. A brief overview of the offerings and key differentiators.

Seagate Terabyte Drive Models
The Barracuda ES.2 model is targeted for enterprise use and comes with serial attached SCSI interface option, along with regular SATA 2, and offers 20% reduction in power consumption. According to Seagate ES.2 boosts reliability with an industry-best unrecoverable error rate that is 10 times better than desktop-class drives.

The Barracuda 7200.11 is targeted for consumer desktops. It has a sustained data rate of 105 MB/sec

Both drives offer 7,200-rpm spin speeds, up to 32 MB of cache, average seek times of 8.5 milliseconds, and a reliability rating of 1.2 million hours mean time between failure (MTBF).

Cost
The 7200.11 is priced at $399.99. Both of them are scheduled to ship in Q3 2007.

Samsung Terabyte Disk Drive
Last week Samsung Electronics announced its one terabyte F1 Series hard disk drive, which features the world’s highest recording density in a 3.5” hard disk drive using only 3 disks.

Whisper-quiet operation is ensured via Samsung’s NoiseGuard and SilentSeek technologies, which reduce overall noise and vibration. The optimized electronics and power saving modes reduce power consumption and resulting heat dissipation, making the F1 the coolest operating 1TB drive on the market. PMR recording with Samsung’s Flying on Demand (FOD) head technology ensures improved recording stability over changing temperature ranges.

The F1 Series drive features a 334GB per-platter capacity, a 7200RPM spin speed, a 32MB cache, and up to a 1.2 million hour MTBF. The F1 Series offers high reliability for enterprise requirements and is optimized for RAID applications. It features a SATA 3Gb/s interface with NCQ and many additional SATA features. It offers improved performance with SHOS based firmware, vibration tolerance with a rotational vibration sensor and lower power consumption with an optimized SOC.

Samsung’s SpinPoint F1 Series is currently shipping with a $399 MSRP.

Differentiators between Samsung & Seagate Terabyte Disk drives
Samsung is using three platters in its terabyte drives while Seagate is using four. Seagate’s new terabyte drives use perpendicular recording, instead of longitudinal. Perpendicular recording enables magnetic charges to be stored vertically on a platter, providing a higher storage density.

Both of them are competitively priced at $399. Samsung’s drive are already on sale while Seagate’s will be available in Q3 2007.