“The SATA 6Gb/second storage interface will meet the demand for higher-bandwidth PCs. Seagate has a long history of being first to market with new technologies such as Serial ATA, perpendicular recording and self-encrypting drives, and is pleased to be teaming with AMD to stage the world’s first public demonstration of SATA 6Gb/second storage,” said Joan Motsinger, Seagate vice president of personal systems marketing and strategy.

The Serial ATA-600 interface will deliver burst speeds of up to 600MB/s (or 6Gb/s), maintain backward compatibility with the SATA 150 and 300 interfaces, and use the same cables and connectors as previous Serial ATA generations to ease integration. The third generation of the mainstream storage interface for desktop and notebook computers also enhances power efficiency and improves Native Command Queuing (NCQ), a SATA feature, to increase overall system performance and data transfer speeds of mainstream PC applications, but especially applications with heavily transactional workloads such as scientific modeling and forecasting, and engineering design and simulation.

The Seagate and AMD demonstration features two Seagate disk drives – one a shipping Barracuda 7200.12 with Serial ATA-300 interface and the other a prototype Barracuda Serial ATA-600 drive – in a desktop PC to show the performance difference between the two generations. The PC is powered by a prototype of a core-logic from AMD that supports Serial ATA-600 chipset. The Seagate SATA-300 drive runs at more than 250MB/s and the SATA-600 drive at 550 MB/s, with the performance of each storage interface displayed on the PC monitor.

In fact, even 10 000rpm hard drives these days have sustained media to buffer read speed of about 120MB/s and since solid state drives have higher sustained speeds and some of them may even take advantage of higher than 300MB/s interface. Seagate does not admit that 600MB/s is an overkill for HDDs and also claims that enterprise SSDs will benefit from Serial Attached SCSI 600 first.

“SATA 6.0Gb/s will launch in high end 3.5″ 7200rpm HDDs first. SATA 6.0Gb/s will work just as well on SSD, and SSD will most likely take advantage of the higher I/O speed, however, this market is really cost driven and SSD would most likely take advantage of the higher speed of SAS 6Gb/s first,” said Marc Noblitt, senior marketing I/O development manager.

www.xbitlabs.com

The Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive combines proven PMR technology, components and expert manufacturing to provide 1.5TB of reliable storage for mainstream desktop computers, workstations, desktop RAID, gaming and high-end PCs, and USB/FireWire/eSATA external storage.

Seagate’s new 2.5-inch half-terabyte 5400- and 7200-rpm drives – Momentus® 5400.6 and Momentus 7200.4 – deliver the best combination of capacity, mobility and durability for mainstream and high-performance notebook computers, external storage solutions, PCs and industrial applications requiring small form factor.

Highlighting the global growth of digital content, Seagate expects to ship its two billionth hard drive within the next five years. Earlier this year Seagate shipped its one billionth hard drive since the company’s inception nearly 30 years ago.

“Organizations and consumers of all kinds worldwide continue to create, share and consume digital content at levels never before seen, giving rise to new markets, new applications and demand for desktop and notebook computers with unprecedented storage capacity, performance and reliability,” said Michael Wingert, Seagate executive vice president and general manager, Personal Compute Business. “Seagate is committed to powering the next generation of computing today with the planet’s fastest, highest-capacity and most reliable storage solutions.”

Momentus 5400.6 and Momentus 7200.4 hard drives are the fourth generation of Seagate’s laptop family to use PMR. The Momentus 5400.6, a 5400-rpm drive, combines a powerful Serial ATA 3Gb/second interface and capacities ranging from 120GB to 500GB with an 8MB cache.

The Momentus 7200.4 hard drive, with its 7200-rpm spin speed and a Serial ATA 3GB/second interface, delivers true desktop performance. The power-efficient 7200-rpm drive maximizes battery life and comes in capacities ranging from 250GB to 500GB with a 16MB cache.

Both Momentus drives are built tough enough to withstand up to 1,000 Gs of non-operating shock and 350 Gs of operating shock to protect drive data, making the drives ideal for systems that are subject to rough handling or high levels of vibration. For added robustness in mobile environments, the Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 are offered with G-Force Protection, a free-fall sensor technology that helps prevent drive damage and data loss upon impact if a laptop PC is dropped. The sensor works by detecting any changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity and parks the heads off the disc to prevent contact with the platter in a free fall of as little as 8 inches and within 3/10ths of a second.

Seagate’s new Momentus drives are lean on power consumption, allowing notebook users to work longer between battery charges, and are virtually inaudible thanks to Seagate’s innovative SoftSonic™ fluid-dynamic bearing motors and QuietStep™ ramp load technology.

The Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive combines the capacity and speed required for today’s most demanding desktop PC applications. The drive packs 1.5TB on just four platters and its fast Serial ATA 3Gb/second interface delivers an industry-leading sustained data rate of up to 120MB/second for fast boot, application startup and file access. The 3.5-inch drive is also offered in capacities of 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB and 160GB with cache options of 32MB and 16MB.

All Momentus and Barracuda drives are backed by Seagate’s leading five-year warranty. You can find photos of these three new drives.

Availability

Shipments of the Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB are set to begin August 2008. Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 hard drives are to begin shipping in Q4 calendar 2008.

www.seagate.com