Seagates New Notebook PC Drives Feature Perpendicular Recording

Shrinking the gap between desktop and laptop storage capabilities, Seagate Technology LLC on Monday announced that it is shipping the Seagate Momentus 5400.3—its new 2.5-inch notebook PC drive featuring the addition of perpendicular recording for elevated levels of hard drive data density and capacity for notebook users.

The Momentus 5400.3 offers up to 160GB of capacity and delivers 132 gigabits per square inch on the 5,400-rpm drive.

Seagate plans to apply perpendicular recording to its 7,200-rpm Momentus disk drives and to its smaller device 1-inch drives and desktop-oriented 3.5-inch products.

In fact, customers can expect the vast majority of Seagates enterprise, desktop, notebook, consumer electronics and retail drives to be shipping with perpendicular recording technology before the end of 2006, said Michael Hall, a spokesperson for Scotts Valley, Calif.-based Seagate.

A radical departure from traditional longitudinal recording, perpendicular recording places data bits on the end of the disk instead of flat to the surface without putting extra pressure on power consumption or spin speed.

This enables more bits to move under the drive head unimpeded in the same amount of time and invariably leads to performance boosts by removing any extra workload on the drive.

In terms of heat generation reduction, by increasing the capacity to aerial disk speed without increasing the disks component count, wear and tear on the drive is significantly lessened.

As a result, reliability is strengthened by safeguarding data against thermal decay, Hall said.

The Momentus 5400.3 hard drive currently shipping to the channel is equipped with the Ultra ATA 100MB/second interface.

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Seagate says it will ship its Momentus 5400.3 hard disk drive with the 1.5 Gbit/second SATA (serial ATA) interface sometime later this year.

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