Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Seagate Pushes Hard Drive Platters to 160GB

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the more-data-crammed-in dept.

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."

13 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. most important question for me.. by CdBee · · Score: 4, Interesting

    .. and for many others, I suspect:

    Will be be sold with an ATA-133 interface as well as the usual SATA?

    Some may argue that a drive like this is overkill, or even wasted, on an old machine but people like me - who spruce up old P3s bought on eBay by adding faster drives and RAM to make economical web PCs for friends and family - would love to get our grubby little mitts on a drive like this !

    --
    I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
  2. the review suggests they aren't so great by GenKreton · · Score: 4, Interesting

    After looking over all the pretty graphs, it seems the 74gb Western Digital Raptor spanks the other drives in everything but platter density. And to push this farther I saw nothing about its reliability published. The 500gb hd isn't using the new platter technology and the 160gb drive is crippled compared to the larger brethren because of its smaller cache. The only thing I got from this review was that if I needed a drive that performs I should buy a Raptor.

    1. Re:the review suggests they aren't so great by fredistheking · · Score: 4, Interesting

      WD is coming out with a new Raptor in January. 150GB and a clear cover. You head it here first.

    2. Re:the review suggests they aren't so great by fredistheking · · Score: 4, Interesting

      BTW, expect data rates in excess of 85MB/s.

  3. Re:Warning to those who buy Seagate DON'T FORGET by catmistake · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And hey... watch out, and don't forget, these fly-by-nighters only offer a 5 year warranty on their internal drives. And you can bet their drives are gonna die right after their warranty ends... ok, well, within 5 or 10 years of right after their warranty ends... ok, well... they can't last forever, can they?

    --
    The Admin and the Engineer
  4. Re:No need after a while. by Trepalium · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I remember people saying the same thing about 500MB drives, and 2GB drives and 10GB drives and 40GB drives. Today, many programs install well over 500MB of data for only themselves, and many games exceed 2GB quite easily. When Bluray or HD-DVD comes to PC, I can see 10-15GB game installs becoming common. The space will get filled, one way or another.

    --
    I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
  5. reliability issues by pario · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Could anyone knowledgeable care to comment on how reliable this drive can be?

    I bought an external drive from Seagate and my experience with the drive was absolutely horrendous.
    It was so unreliable that I had to return the drive and paid a restocking fee.
    I thought it was just me, but these user reviews suggest otherwise.
    Personally I would not touch another Seagate product with a 10 foot pole.

    1. Re:reliability issues by Electronik · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I use exclusivly Seagate internal drives for all the computers I build. They are very reliable drives that come with a good warinty. The fact that they had some USB external drive with problems says nothing about the long term experence with Seagate. It sounds like that USB drive had some programing issues on the drive, not problems with the drive itself IMHO. I personaly would tend to stay away from USB external drives if possible.

      --
      -=test-sig_0.1.5(NoWhitespaceVersion)=-
    2. Re:reliability issues by ezzzD55J · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I have a Seagate 103MB (or thereabouts) hard drive from my first PC ever, which still spins up and still has all the original data on it, bit-perfect.

      That's great, but the problem with these 10-year reliability indications is that it's an indication of a drive (and company) 10 years old.. who knows what corners they've cut since then? 160GB drives are not the same as 103MB either..

    3. Re:reliability issues by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Actually, the 7200.8 line from Seagate should be avoided at all costs. You'll mainly see this in their 300GB and 400GB drives, although some of their 200GB and 250GB drives are 7200.8 instead of 7200.7 as well. While the 7200.7 is among the more reliable drives on the market (ranked better than 84% of all other drives by storagereview.com's reliability survey), the 7200.8 is among the worst, ranked better than only 10%.

      Stores are blowing these drives out with low prices, and there's a reason why.

  6. Re:2 heads by Agripa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It used to be possible to do what you describe however once track pitch became high enough they had to switch to using embedded servo data because head alignment was not longer consistent between platters. Not only is there platter to platter variation in track alignment but the tracks themselves are eccentric. The only way you can keep more then one head in alignment is to have more then one servo actuator.

    The last drive I had with dedicated servo tracks was a Micropolis 8760E 5.25 inch full height drive. Note that these types of drives actually can be low level formatted since the servo data is not involved.

  7. Re:Warning to those who buy Seagate by ottothecow · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Out of curiosity, what drive did you buy 2 weeks ago? There are some good deals on the 300GB 7200.8 but I have heard that they are fairly noisy(for a seagate) and arent really that fast. I still want to buy a seagate because they tend to be quiet and have long warrantys but that 300GB maxtor MaXLineIII (with 5yr) is looking mighty tempting.

    --
    Bottles.
  8. Re:Think long term... by matt21811 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually, I say they new hard disks will be obsolete in just 11 years.

    Read about it here: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashvsharddisk .html

    The gist of it is that right now your dollar buys about 130 times more hard disk space than flash memory. In almost every year, you can buy more space for your dollar than you could last year. This improvement for hard disks in the last two years was measured at 44% per annum. The annualised improvement for flash storage over the same period was measured at 118%. By simply extrapolating these figures into the future until the megs per dollar figure for flash beats that of hard disks gives the date of 2017 or in just 11 years time.
     
    The rest of it covers why performace shouldnt be an issue is 11 years time.