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Seagate Technology bared the teeth of its new Barracuda 7200.10 family of perpendicular recording-based hard drives April 26.
Currently shipping to OEMs, the devices squeeze 750GB of digital storage space onto a single disk drive for desktop computers and low-end servers.
The fifth perpendicular recording hard drive released by Seagate, the 3.5-inch Barracuda 7200.10 performs about 10 percent higher than its previous generation, the Barracuda 7200.9.
The new Barracuda family features formatted capacity points ranging from 200GB, 250GB, 300GB, 320GB, 400GB, 500GB and 750GB on four platters.
Additionally, interface choices include ATA/100, SATA (serial ATA) 1.5GB per second or SATA 3GB per second with NCQ (Native Command Queuing) capabilities.
The new Seagate hard drives offer 8MB or 16MB cache buffer options.
On the 250GB and above, 16MB cache is offered; 8MB cache on the 200GB and 250GB only; and both size cache on the 250 only.
On May 1, Seagate will launch the external hard drive counterpart of the 750GB Barracuda 7200.10 product line.
The external version will have the same specifications and features of the internal disk drive model, according to Joanie Clark, product marketing manager for Scotts Valley, Calif.-based Seagate.
Quickly gaining ground on longitudinal disk drives, perpendicular recording disk drives increase areal density or the amount of storage a hard drive can hold by achieving higher write fields thereby enabling media with improved thermal stability to be utilized.
For instance, a 2.5-inch longitudinal 80GB disk drive with 2 platters and 3 heads can be shrunk down to 1 platter and 2 heads on a 2.5-inch perpendicular 80GB disk drive, said Clark.
The maximum sustained data transfer rate of the Barracuda 7200.10 is 78MB per second.
Regarding performance and ruggedness, the disk drive has a spindle speed of 7200 RPM and operating shock levels of 68Gs.
Areal density ranges from the high-end is 136GB per square inch.
Also, acoustics on the new Barracuda devices have been redesigned to promote quietness to the tune of 2.7 bels with the disk drive idle and 3.0 bels during seek mode.
A clean sweep mechanism on the new Barracuda devices passes the drive head over the complete area of the platter during power-on to ensure that any irregularities on the disk surface are smoothed out.
An adaptive fly height feature compensates for the distance between the disk head and platter to keep in step with any change in environmental operating conditions.
In terms of “best-fit” areas for the Barracuda 7200.10, Seagate is targeting its new bigger capacity drives at high-end and mainstream PCs, workstations, desktop RAID, low-cost servers and external storage systems, Clark said.