Getting Dense At Seagate
Just a week after Hitachi and Phillips announced their massive 1 terabyte drives, Seagate has announced they've come up with a way to put quite a bit less --250 gigabytes-- into their 7200.10 series of hard drives. The kicker is that they're putting all 250 GBs of capacity on one platter in their 3.5" drive.
The advantage of running a single platter in a drive comes down to
lower power consumption, lower operating temperatures and less noise. Seagate did not disclose how much power the new drive will consume, previous
7200.10 drives with multiple platters, however, are rated at 7.5 watts
– which is more three times the consumption of current 250 GB 2.5”
drives, which rotate their discs at lower speeds (5400 rpm instead of
7200 rpm), but typically consume only around 2 watts during read and
write processes.
That's 180 GBs per square inch. Offering less, yes; but fitting that "less" into much, much less space. So it's more, really. That density per inch would make Seagate's competitor Hitachi's 1TB 5 platter drive into a 1.25 TB wonder. Keep going, fellows. I'll raise my hand when I have enough storage.