Seagate Pushes Hard Drive Platters to 160GB

TheRainDog writes "Although perpendicular recording has yet to make its way into desktop hard drives, Seagate continues to push platter densities the old fashioned way. The company's 160GB platters have the highest areal density in the industry by over 25%, allowing Seagate to create a 160GB Barracuda 7200.9 hard drive that uses a single platter and costs under $90. The single-platter design has lower noise levels and power consumption than multi-platter designs, and a lower probability of a catastrophic head crash. Higher areal densities also allow the drive head access the same amount of data over shorter physical distances, improving performance dramatically in some instances. The Tech Report has an in-depth review of the 160GB Barracuda 7200.9's performance against eight competitors from Hitachi, Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital."

Comments

Re:Risk of High Data Density

[John.P.Jones]

Scratches on optical media come from handling the media, this happens at all sorts of velocities and thus there are a wide variety of scratches with varying degrees of damage.

Scratches on Hard disks come from the freakin' head smashing into the disk while it is spinning at 7200rpm, there is no such thing as a benign head crash, when it happens it is bad, the head is gonna skip off the surface of the disk like a pebble on a lake. It is going to be bad no matter what the data density is.

So the difference between scratches and head crashes is miles apart, not just due to data density. In actuality the data density differences are insignificant compared to the other issues.

Re:Correction to this slashvertisement

[non-poster]

the fact that the drives are spinning faster

Interpreting as "the platters are spinning faster".

Faster than what? All 7200 rpm drives have platters that spin at... 7200 rpm. Drives of this speed have been around for years and years. 10k and 15k rpm drives have been around for a while, too.

Just what, exactly, are you making a comparison against?