backtop

Hardware Seagate Confirms 1TB Hard Disk Drive
Purav Sanghani - January 4, 2007 3:36 PM
Print E-mail del.icio.us 67 comment(s) - last by TechGuru.. on Jan 11 at 10:14 PM
We should expect to see 1TB hard disk drive products within 6 months

Seagate Technology has just released information to DailyTech with regard to the company's upcoming highest capacity hard disk drive to date. At 1TB, if no other hard disk drive manufacturer can catch up, Seagate will have the highest capacity hard drive product to market first.

The 1TB hard disk drive will be based on perpendicular recording technology which packs bits tighter onto the magnetic platter by positioning them perpendicular to the platter as opposed to linear recording which positions bits horizontally. The perpendicular recording technology, which has been in use by Seagate and its platter supplier for over a year now, will be put to the test as Seagate states the 1TB product will implement fewer platters and heads to improve the performance of the drive.

In a statement to DailyTech earlier today, the company claimed:
Seagate’s 1TB hard drive will be our second generation 3.5-inch hard drive to feature capacity-boosting perpendicular recording technology, and it will use fewer heads and discs than similar-capacity products we expect to see from our competitors. It is clear that fewer heads and discs, along with our proven perpendicular technology, can increase drive reliability, and also reduce operating temperatures, power consumption, noise, and weight.
It is confirmed now that we should expect a 1TB Barracuda from Seagate Technology to hit the market in full force sometime in the first half of this calendar year.   Seagate was also the first company to announce a 750GB hard drive last year.  No company has since announced a drive with 750GB or greater capacity.

Comments     Threshold


This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled
i wish they would make them quieter
By noxipoo on 1/4/2007 4:06:04 PM , Rating: 3
the old seagate drives were quiet but my recently purchased 320gig sata HD clicks so loud it annoys the hell out of me.




RE: i wish they would make them quieter
By bunnyfubbles on 1/4/2007 4:13:08 PM , Rating: 2
I've got 4 of those drives in my P180 and don't have any noise problems from my HDDs.


RE: i wish they would make them quieter
By Kougar on 1/4/2007 7:26:50 PM , Rating: 2
Seconded. I have four in my P180 and no noise from them.

I have a 5th SATA Seagate drive that completely lacks Acoustic Management ability though, and that one sounds like a cricket a room over under medium to heavy writes in progress.


By FITCamaro on 1/10/2007 3:47:52 PM , Rating: 2
Heck I got 2 74GB Raptors in RAID0 and I I barely hear them unless I'm say defragging. Even then its barely audible. If I've got some source of other sound in the room I can't hear it. Makes me be able to load areas in games like Oblivion and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes nice and quick too.


RE: i wish they would make them quieter
By tobrien on 1/4/2007 8:04:21 PM , Rating: 2
Well I was talking to the anandtech guy who reviewed the perpendicular 320 Seagates and was telling him my two drives sound almost like my two Raptors and he was saying it's about where they're manufactured. I forget where the two places are (maybe China and Taiwan?) but he was saying that drives from one place would click while others wouldn't.

I have no idea why one location's drives would and another's wouldn't if they're being manufactured in the exact same way but that's what appears to be it. :/


By Kougar on 1/5/2007 12:04:43 AM , Rating: 2
Two of my drives are from China, the other two are from Singapore, all four from NewEgg during one of their specials.

The two from China have the older AAC firmware, and the two from Singapore were the newer AAD firmware. I haven't used them outside the P180 yet so I can't really say about any possible differences between them.


RE: i wish they would make them quieter
By vdig on 1/4/2007 4:14:00 PM , Rating: 1
Are you certain that the hard drive is not defective? I always thought clicking sounds was a very bad sign, indicating impending hard drive failure. Heard too many stories of clicking hard drives from my acquaintances.

One trilobite. Nice. I bet that can store tons of porn... err, data! Yes, data. I meant data, yeah.


RE: i wish they would make them quieter
By lennylim on 1/4/2007 4:25:33 PM , Rating: 5
Well, Seagate's CEO certainly isn't arguing against your usage.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/11/30/magazines/fortune/...

By the way, a trilobite is an arthropod that died out before the dinosaurs appeared.


Moderated
By encryptkeeper on 1/4/07, Rating: -1
RE: i wish they would make them quieter
By encryptkeeper on 1/4/2007 4:40:16 PM , Rating: 2
Damn I didn't mean to put the WHOLE post in italics. Although I got the Parent/Reply in italics too...cool.


By encryptkeeper on 1/4/2007 4:40:59 PM , Rating: 2
Nevermind....EVERYTHING's in italics...


By KristopherKubicki (blog) on 1/4/2007 4:43:30 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
He's one hell of a human being. Brings a tear to my eye...
quote:


Sorry, I had to kill your comment to clean up that forum bug. I reported it to our developer.



RE: i wish they would make them quieter
By Xtremist on 1/4/2007 4:40:35 PM , Rating: 2
Can't say I'm an authority on Seagate drives, but they're the only brand I buy and I have a few of them. Various drives sound different, but the Seagate's do tend to sound more 'clicky' than other brands I've used in the past. Again, it could be that all mine are bad too, but I'd certainly hope not as I rely on them pretty intensively ;-)

1x 80gig
2x 200gig
2x 300gig
2x 400gig

No failures. I did have a scare with a RAID controller while testing Vista where it would continually report a degraded array and start rebuilding it and stop partially through the rebuild. I thought I was in trouble then, but I think it was just the controller not liking Vista very much since going back to Win2k3 solved the issue.

Can't wait for these terabytes to come out!!! I can't wait much longer lol.


By StevoLincolnite on 1/4/2007 8:45:32 PM , Rating: 1
Only Seagate drives?
I've tried most of the brands, I generally get whats cheapest, Never really had any problems with any drive failing on me.
Except when I got a Fujitsu 120 GB IDE drive back in the day, And that was only because I dropped it, And it fell down some steps, even then it ended up running for a few days before screaming "I'm a teapot!".

But it does seem Seagate has the upper hand in the market at the moment, Lets see if some other company's bring out some competition to lower prices :)


RE: i wish they would make them quieter
By noxipoo on 1/4/2007 5:53:35 PM , Rating: 2
yeah, i've had deathstar, WD, and maxtor HDs fail on me, these are seeking clicks. they are that loud.


By Felofasofa on 1/4/2007 9:16:02 PM , Rating: 2
Have to agree with you on the Deckstars. Some of the deckstars we'd buy would arrive dead, others fail in a short period. Had problems with early Cheetahs (SCSI) failing but that was after around 5 years of solid use. Then ran very hot though.


RE: i wish they would make them quieter
By MrDiSante on 1/4/2007 5:00:53 PM , Rating: 1
I haven't had any problems with my 320 gig barracuda 7200.10. It's silent as far as I can tell. On the topic of noise, if you make a processor that's 65W TDP (e6600) you'd think that you'd make the chipset (965P) nice and cool as well, but noooooooooo my fan's running full speed at least 1/2 the time because of the bleeding north bridge.


By stromgald on 1/4/2007 5:53:41 PM , Rating: 1
The 965 series of Intel chipsets is rather cool compared to their nVidia counterparts and chipsets from other manufacturers. Maybe you should've bought a P965 board with a passive heatsink instead of one with a puny high speed fan on the northbridge? If you want it quiet, just go buy a passive northbridge heatsink and swap it out.


By Aikouka on 1/5/2007 8:08:57 AM , Rating: 2
My 750GB 7200.10 Seagate drive is also quiet to me. I don't know if this has anything to do with my choice in case (Lian Li PC1200+) or if the drive's noise is simply being over-stated by people that're just used to "quieter drives". All I know is that the 750s are great, although the price may seem a bit high (especially when buying multiple!).

1TB drives will be nice for people that use quite a bit of space (i.e. video editors/filmers, etc) and they will also help drive the price of the lower but still big drives (500, 750) down a little bit (hopefully).


By stromgald on 1/4/2007 5:56:55 PM , Rating: 2
Most of my HDDs also click. I think its an inevitable fact of life, and I've gotten used to it. Unless you get a special enclosure for the HDD, I don't think you can avoid the noise. Supposedly, the newer WDs are quiet and Samsungs have always been fairly quiet.

It also helps if you buy drives with only one platter, like the 160GB (1 platter) 7200.9 Seagate I recently bought. Its much quieter than the 300GB (3 platter) 7200.8 Seagate I have.


Still annoying
By shaw on 1/4/2007 5:51:52 PM , Rating: 2
Depressing only because it's still only like 953GB. I want to install it into my machine and see exactally 1,000GB of usable space!

Second most annoying thing to me next to misleading processor speeds to equate performance.




RE: Still annoying
By ATWindsor on 1/4/2007 6:16:19 PM , Rating: 2
No, it is 1000 GBs, Its is 953 (or somthing) GiBs, which windows wrongly reports as GBs. Kilo has been defined as 1000 for hundreds of years(?), (and mega as 1000 000 and so on). That some part of the computer industry used it wrong for a cpuple of decades doesn't change that kilo=1000, it has been for a very long time, and that every other field in the world uses kilo as 1000.


RE: Still annoying
By Omega215D on 1/4/2007 10:37:09 PM , Rating: 3
No, Windows does not report this wrong. Computers are dealing with binaries or powers of 2.

"As of 2006, most consumer hard drives are defined by their gigabyte-range capacities. The true capacity is usually some number above or below the class designation. Although most hard disk manufacturers' definition of GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes (however, computer memory has a natural inclination towards units that are powers of 2), most computer operating systems use the 1,073,741,824 byte definition. This distinction can be a cause of confusion, especially for people from a non-technical background, as a hard disk with a capacity of 40,000,000,000 bytes would have a reported capacity of only 37.4 GB."

The hard drive manufacturers are skewing things a bit.


RE: Still annoying
By ATWindsor on 1/5/2007 4:41:52 AM , Rating: 2
Wrong, if they need to use powers of two, they shouldn't have used a prefix DEFINED as 1000. If you need to represent the numer 1024, do not take a prefix DEFINED to 1000. You have the KiB-prefix for 1024. The harddisk-makers follow the correct definition used for over a hundred years, and in any other field (and substainsial part of the computer-field also).


RE: Still annoying
By mindless1 on 1/5/2007 6:48:55 AM , Rating: 2
Completely false.

You fail to understand that byte cannot be valid in a decimal system. If they use byte, it is manditory that the other prefixes be binary, a number cannot be in both number formats.

If they'd like to reinvent terms, call it a blob not byte.


RE: Still annoying
By Aikouka on 1/5/2007 8:16:35 AM , Rating: 2
If this is your rationalization, then you just destroyed the entire concept of the metric system. Based on this, terms such as "kilometer" are invalid, because a meter isn't a number, it's a predefined length.

Where you're wrong is, kilometer (for example) only means thousands of meters, or when used with a number (i.e. 8 kilometers), it translates to 8 thousand meters. It's a system of abbreviation not translation! If a hard drive was 8 KB, 8 kilobytes means just what it says, 8 thousand bytes. Hence why your hard drive ends up being less than you expect, because the notation is not the same.


RE: Still annoying
By ATWindsor on 1/5/2007 9:52:36 AM , Rating: 2
Kilo means 1000, it is defined as 1000, it makes perfect sense to say 1000 bytes. And if you need a prefix that means 1024, use another prefix than the one already defined as 1000, and used as 1000 in every imaginable field for hundreds of years.


RE: Still annoying
By Serlant on 1/5/2007 9:54:48 AM , Rating: 1
Take it back to basics? 1GiB or 1 gibibyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes(i think), but 1GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes ,so when you buy an 80GB hard drive your a buying a 80GiB hard drive, which actually only has 74.5GB or gigabytes. its the manufacturer specifieing the wrong unit, although its just been accepted. so it you wanted to buy an actual 80GB hard drive it would be specified as 85.8GB by todays incorrect labelling, or 85.8GiB with the correct labelling.


RE: Still annoying
By ATWindsor on 1/5/2007 10:49:38 AM , Rating: 2
When you buy a 80 GB disk you get 80 000 000 000 bytes. I other words you get 80 GB, Which is the same as 74.5 GiB. To get a 80 GiB HD, you must buy one labled as 80 GiB, or 85.8 GB (which is the same).

So you mixed up abit, the HD-manufactureres say you get 80 GB, which you do, people are just upset that they don't get 85.8 GB (80 GiBs).



RE: Still annoying
By Serlant on 1/5/2007 10:58:11 AM , Rating: 2
Yup got it a bit mixed up. so its basically the OS' fault for saying that you have an 80GB have drive which you have, but it then also states that you have a 74.5GB hard drive, which you dont, you have a 74.5GiB hard drive. is that right?


RE: Still annoying
By ATWindsor on 1/5/2007 11:13:28 AM , Rating: 2
Correct, the OS states that you have 74.5 GB, when you really have 74.5 Gibs (or 80 GBs if you want)


RE: Still annoying
By PrinceGaz on 1/5/2007 8:44:55 AM , Rating: 2
Hard-drive manufacturers (and also optical disk manufacturers since DVD days) are sticking with the decimal prefixes and it would be disadvantageous for any of them to switch to using the binary prefixes, so we'll just have to get used to converting them correctly.

One slight point is that 1TB / 1000GB (decimal) is actually only about 931GB (binary).

It'll be even more fun once drives are large enough for their binary size in Windows and other OSs to be reported as TB rather than GB as there'll be a further discrepancy in sizes. A 2TB drive would actually appear as about 1.82TB (nearly 10% less than the binary size!)


RE: Still annoying
By ATWindsor on 1/5/2007 9:54:49 AM , Rating: 2
There is nothing wrong with binary prefixes, but windows uses the wrong name, it should be 931 GiB, or 1.82 TiB 1000 GB = 931 GiB, 1000 GB is not the same as 932 GB.


RE: Still annoying
By Oregonian2 on 1/5/2007 2:51:26 PM , Rating: 2
There's no particular reason I can think of why a disk drive needs to be described using binary sorts of sizing. Memory yes, because it's accessed using a binary address. But drives aren't addressed in that manner and could just as well be "regular" sorts of kilo/mega/giga.

It's kind of like flash where NOR-flash is necessarily binary-addressed, while NAND-flash (although are still described by binary sorts of sizing) are addressed through file-system sorts of attributes like hard drives (and historically had lots of bad-blocks and the like which is why the actual sizes weren't what was written on them -- and in fact some NAND-flash modules even now say this very thing in the fine print, especially the cheaper brands).

(NAND flash is the kind in digital cameras, iPods, etc. and are file-system devices while NOR-flash act (roughly) as non-volatile RAM memory)


Why not just.....
By Comdrpopnfresh on 1/4/2007 5:42:05 PM , Rating: 2
Its quite apparent that only capacities, not performance is going to increase in harddrives (I still bet capacities will top off at 1.6 tb). So why not make a 5.25" harddrive? Its not like it won't fit in most computers. With more and more cases getting larger, but newer mobos including less and less ata connectors, the spaces once held by multiple optical drives are laying open, waiting for a huge harddrive...




RE: Why not just.....
By stromgald on 1/4/2007 5:48:38 PM , Rating: 2
I think its a matter of fabrication not space. They already have the equipment and production lines to build 3.5" and notebook drive casings and such. The only thing that changes are the platters.

If they go to 5.25" drives, they have to redesign everything from the read head/arm mechanism to the casing. They would also have to redo the production line. It's probably not worth it for the manufacturer, but for the consumer it wouldn't be too bad since most people don't use up all their 5.25" slots.

P.S. Cooling may also play a factor.


RE: Why not just.....
By patentman on 1/8/2007 7:54:05 AM , Rating: 2
If they go to 5.25" drives, they have to redesign everything from the read head/arm mechanism to the casing. They would also have to redo the production line. It's probably not worth it for the manufacturer, but for the consumer it wouldn't be too bad since most people don't use up all their 5.25" slots.

I highly doubt they would have to redesign the read-head, as this portion of a HDD is matched to the type of magnetic material used on the usrface of the platter, not platter size. You are correct that a new spindle arm would have to be developed.

And yes, I know what I am talking about, seeing as how I examined and allowed most of the patents that serve as the foundation for Seagates current product line.


RE: Why not just.....
By gbed on 1/4/2007 6:58:55 PM , Rating: 2
Maxtor had modern (ide) 5.25 drive at one time, I believe it was called the bigfoot. The increased platter size resulted in longer seek times and didn't really show a performance advantage over the 3.5 drives of the time, so went away pretty quickly.


RE: Why not just.....
By Felofasofa on 1/4/2007 9:18:44 PM , Rating: 4
Bigfoots were made by Quantum, and they were slugs.....


RE: Why not just.....
By patentman on 1/8/2007 12:16:49 PM , Rating: 2
And Quantum I think now is owned by Seagate. Really, the only thing wrong with a 5.25 inch drive is making a platter that big ultra flat so that it doesn't wobb;le like crazy at high speed. The lower read speed of the bigfoot drive resulted from this problem as I recall.


Price...
By d33pblue on 1/4/2007 4:30:39 PM , Rating: 2
Frankly, the only question on my mind is one of price. If it costs four times what a 500GB drive does, why even bother?

To even be worth looking at, this drive would have to cost less than $500. I'm sort of doubting it'll come in at that price range, but we can hope.




RE: Price...
By hunter44102 on 1/4/2007 4:42:57 PM , Rating: 2
Hitachi should be releasing a 1TB drive soon. They said End of 2006/Early 2007.

This should at least drive down the prices of the 500GB/750GB drives


RE: Price...
By Xtremist on 1/4/2007 4:44:27 PM , Rating: 2
I'd expect the initial release to cost maybe $600 or so? Probably a hundred more but I'm hoping $600 :-) I definately agree price is important, but there's several people who will want to get a 3TB RAID-5 going with only 4 drives opposed to 2.25TB using the 750's. And some of those will be willing to pay the premium. I personally am looking for the 750's to drop even more when the 1TB's come out and maybe pick up 4 of those for $250/each or so? That would be very nice!


RE: Price...
By Shadowself on 1/4/2007 5:07:09 PM , Rating: 2
$600 or even $700 would be chump change to the price of the first 9GB drive by Seagate over a decade ago. It shipped at $4,500 (yes, four thousand five hundred dollars for a nine gigabyte drive) and stayed at that price for about six months.

Ah, how times have changed.


RE: Price...
By Lonyo on 1/5/2007 5:00:40 AM , Rating: 2
Hitachi says $400 for its 1TB drive, which means Seagate can't charge much more, or they won't get any business.


RE: Price...
By Samus on 1/5/2007 6:18:48 AM , Rating: 2
except i'd pay $100 more for a 1tb seagate than a 1tb hitachi. for two reasons. reliability. warranty.


Keeping up with the Jones
By borowki on 1/4/2007 5:16:14 PM , Rating: 2
It probably sounds stupid but it annoys me how quickly hard-drive capacity is growing. Just six months ago I upgraded to a 160gig drive and how it's already a small fraction of what one can buy. Not that I'm anywhere near filling up the thing, still it hurts my techie self-esteem.

Wish there's an easier way to upgrade hard-drives.




RE: Keeping up with the Jones
By DigitalFreak on 1/4/07, Rating: -1
RE: Keeping up with the Jones
By BladeVenom on 1/4/2007 6:10:50 PM , Rating: 2
Does it come with its own cleanroom, or do you have to purchase that separately?


RE: Keeping up with the Jones
By UnFaZeD on 1/4/2007 10:12:02 PM , Rating: 2
hahaha..good one BladeVenom


RE: Keeping up with the Jones
By peternelson on 1/4/2007 10:51:47 PM , Rating: 2
No you just rent the cleanroom desk space by the hour at your local "PC World / Best Buy / substitute your own generic superstore". But you have to take a shower on your way in to minimise skin particle contamination.

They will also ship the extra platters and heads with one of those special hex or torx or star key screwdriver bits.


RE: Keeping up with the Jones
By patentman on 1/8/2007 8:00:41 AM , Rating: 2
I wouldn't be surprised if we started seeing upgradeable hard drives once hybrid drives come to market. Seeing as how the size of flash memory is increasing every year, I don;t think it would be that hard to implement a drive with a removable flash memory where you could just pop in a higher capacity chip and voila, more space.

Can you do the same thing with a flash drive now, well year... but my idea is cooler...er.... yeah


Who's first?
By Dis Gruntled on 1/5/2007 7:11:31 AM , Rating: 2
Since DT posted in the afternoon that Seagate was first to the TB mark, and PCWorld posted in the evening that Hitachi was first, it looks like Seagate managed to snipe Hitachi at the last minute for the first-to-announce props. To my mind, though, that's not quite as important as the first-to-market. We'll see who wins that race soon enough.




RE: Who's first?
By Fnoob on 1/5/2007 9:16:58 AM , Rating: 2
Could care less who is first when they are separated by hours. Who gives a F really? First to market is relevant yes. However, performance is king. The Hitachi has 5 platters, whereas the Seagate will likely have 2-3(?) and spank the Hitachi in terms of performance and reliability.


RE: Who's first?
By Doormat on 1/5/2007 9:55:09 AM , Rating: 2
Yea, I only care about who is first to market. And since Seagate says H1 2007, I'm not all that confident in saying who is winning.


RE: Who's first?
By patentman on 1/8/2007 7:57:35 AM , Rating: 2
Rememebr that this is the first terabyte commerical hard drive. I beleive terabyte capacities were feasible and achieved a long time ago through platter multiplication, but the device was not econmically feasible. Seagates perpendicular technology utilizes a twist on pretty old and well known technology (chemical vapor deposition) to product platters with substantially higher recording capacity. In other words, it costs a lot less for them to make higher desnity platters, which allowed them to finally offer a cost effective 1 TB drive.


How many heads and platters?
By lennylim on 1/4/2007 4:16:05 PM , Rating: 2
Doesn't really say that much, "fewer than the competition", when the competition doesn't have any terabyte drives yet.




RE: How many heads and platters?
By KristopherKubicki (blog) on 1/4/2007 4:45:33 PM , Rating: 2
There are only so many platter manufacturers. What Michael is emphasizing is that the platter guys they are using will have higher density platters available to Seagate before Western Digital.


By patentman on 1/8/2007 8:06:17 AM , Rating: 2
Kris is correct here. It is also important to note that platter manufacturers generally operate under license from the hard drive manufacturer. Thus, the plattr manufacturer generally gets to use the proprietary technology of the hard drive manufacturer. This means that the platters in Seagate's perpendicular drives will be made with their technology, whereas the platters of a competing hard drive manufacturer, e.g., Western Digital, will be made with a different technology.

Accordingly, the platters made by under different licenses for different companies will differ in many respects, including platter size, platter weight, magnetic layer thickness, microwaviness (actual term), surface roughness, theoretical/actual capacity etc. All these things go to cost of manufacture.


Hopefully prices will fall
By Nocturnal on 1/4/2007 4:50:14 PM , Rating: 2
I hope the price of the 750GB will continue to go even lower and break the $200 dollar mark. That would be ideal!




RE: Hopefully prices will fall
By Omega215D on 1/4/2007 10:38:15 PM , Rating: 2
I've found 400GB for $150 so far so it shouldn't be long.


RE: Hopefully prices will fall
By TechGuru on 1/11/2007 10:14:53 PM , Rating: 2
wow

i bout a seagate 400gb sata for $100 about 6 months ago - the deals are out there....


hmm
By averaesaveraesky on 1/5/2007 12:25:40 AM , Rating: 2
da-n, my 120GB is looking smaller and smaller ever' day. might just need to pick up a 250 or 500 soon enough




RE: hmm
By Retrolock on 1/5/2007 2:47:35 AM , Rating: 2
i feel sorry for myself. i still have an 80 gig seagate hdd puttering along with my s754 athlon 64.


Time Saver
By Rocket321 on 1/9/2007 5:35:10 PM , Rating: 2
God bless whoever invented Quick Format...




Holy HDD Space, Batman!
By mezman on 1/5/2007 1:35:03 PM , Rating: 1
<Best_Bill_Gates_Impression>"No one will ever need more then 1 TB of storage space."</Best_Bill_Gates_Impression>




"You can bet that Sony built a long-term business plan about being successful in Japan and that business plan is crumbling." -- Peter Moore, 24 hours before his Microsoft resignation

DailyTech Poll
Which web browser do you use on your primary personal machine? 






44 Comments









botimage
Copyright 2009 DailyTech LLC. - RSS Feed | Advertise | About Us | Ethics | FAQ | Terms, Conditions & Privacy Information | Kristopher Kubicki