Perpendicular Recording Yields Big Disks

June 8, 2006

The next big thing in hard drives is perpendicular recording. These drives are now appearing, with Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 among the largest. At 750 Gbytes, it's a major jump from its predecessor, the 500-Gbyte 7200.9. The new technology le

William G. Wong

The next big thing in hard drives is perpendicular recording. These drives are now appearing, with Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 among the largest.

At 750 Gbytes, it's a major jump from its predecessor, the 500-Gbyte 7200.9. The new technology lets Seagate pack 188 Gbytes on a single platter, but increased areal density is only part of the package. A combination of features makes the drive about 10% faster. It's also very quiet—only 2.7 bels.

Seagate's Adaptive Fly Height adjusts the heads based upon factors such as temperature. Clean Sweep technology passes the head over the entire platter during power-on to smooth out any irregularities in the disc surface. And, the Directed Offline Scan runs diagnostics when the drive isn't being accessed. This is important on large drives where scanning can take a very long time.

Interface support includes ATA100 and 3-Gbit/s SATA-II. Other features include NCQ support, staggered spin-up, and pin 11 LED. MSRP is $590.

Seagate
www.seagate.com

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About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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