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

1,000,000,000,000 bytes

[this great guy]

You mean 1 TB ought to be enough for anybody ?

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?

Re:Correction to this slashvertisement

[hedge_death_shootout]

Interpreting as "the platters are spinning faster".

No really! - with these new HDDs the entire drive spins. Makes it very dangerous to leave the side off your PC.

25% more hard drive density? Stop the presses!

[roystgnr]

Why, this is the most exciting news I've heard since the last time it happened!

Which was about six months ago!

And six months before that, and six months before that, and six months before that, for more than a decade!

HEAT!

[drewzhrodague]

Noone said anthing about heat! I once cooked a burrito on an old 4g Seagate Barracuda. You know the one I'm talking about, with the big metal grille on the front. You see, I was at work, and tinkering with my Sparc 5 workstation, when I realized the fan in the external drive had failed, but not my home directory, upon which it lived. Well, of course I had a burrito handy, and figured that once I did a nice fsck -- twice -- that I'd be reasonably okay, so I put the burrito in the front of the bezel, where the faceplate is supposed to go, bounced the workstation, and started the fsck. Then I went outside to smoke cigarettes. After smoking for a while, and socializing with people, the burrito was no longer frozen, but HOT! Voila, instant sysadmin lunch. Ramen noodles are just as easy, simply take...