2.5-in Terabyte Hard Drive Secures Secrets

Dec. 13, 2010

Seagate's Constellation 2 brings end-to-end reliability and security to enterprise storage.

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Seagate Constellation 2

Seagate delivers a wide range of storage devices like the Momentus XT hybrid hard drive (see Hands-on Momentus XT Hybrid Hard Drive). Its latest offering is in the enterprise area. The Constellation 2 (Fig. 1) drive targets near line storage where reliability is key and capacity is always welcome. The new 7200 rpm, 2.5-in drive can storage up to 1.2 Tbytes with a 1.4 Mhr MTBF. The Constellation line complements the Savvio 10K and 15K hard drives and the Pulsar Solid State Disk (SDD) drives.

The move to 2.5-in in the enterprise is accelerating as systems shrink and the number of drives in a RAID system goes up. The drive is a little thicker than those found in netbooks and notebooks. The drives are available 6 Mbit/s SAS and SATA versions. They use as little as 3.85W when idling and support a range of power mode commands. This turns into a 70% power savings compared to their 3.5-in siblings.

In addition to the SAS and SATA versions, there is a self encrypting SAS drive available. This drive adds support for AES-256 encryption. The drive is <"http://www.nist.gov/">NIST FIPS 140-2 Validated.

What I think is the biggest improvement is the end-to-end data protection. The SAS drive versions have T10 Protection Information (PI) support. This adds 8 bytes of PI CRC information to each 512 byte sector. Unlike the standard, on-drive CRC, the PI information is supplied by the system to the hard drive.

Seagate

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

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