Seagate Delivers 2-Terabyte Hard Drive

Aug. 12, 2009

Technology editor Bill Wong sets up a pair of NAS systems based on VIA Technologies ArTiGO A2000 and Marvell’s SheevaPlug.

William G. Wong

The bar is now set at 2 Tbytes with Seagate’s latest “green” Barracuda LP (low power) drive (see the figure). The 3.5-in hard drive packs 2 Tbytes onto a single platter up from the 1.5 Tbytes of the previous model. It runs at 5900 rpm, up from 5400 rpm providing a small performance boost while being very quiet. The power requirements supposed to be 44% less than the typical desktop hard drive. The 2 Tbyte and 1.5 Tbyte units use 6.8W on average and using 5.5W in idle mode.

The units have a 3 Gbit/s SATA-II interface. The drives have a 32 Mbyte cache and an average latency of 5.5ms. The drive is also available in 1 and 1.5 Tbyte models. By the way, the “green” support means that it is made of 70% recyclable materials.

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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