The PC Report

If you’re in the market for a new SATA 6Gbps hard drive with a nice and large amount of storage then you can now pick up the latest drive from Seagate. The Seagate Constellation ES hard drive comes in a 3.5″ package, supports SATA 6Gbps and spins at 7200 RPM with “best-in-class” reliability. It will soon be available in 500GB, 1TB and the advertised 2TB sizes to store all your stuff; no pricing info yet though…

The current 9.5mm-tall 2.5-inch drives are too tall for some laptop designers, and they want to go slimmer without turning to more expensive measures such as 1.8-inch drives and solid state drives. The perfect solution? Seagate’s Momentus Thin hard drives that are set to launch sometime this week for developers to get their hands on to.

The “world’s thinnest 2.5-inch hard drive” is 7mm high and is set to be a low cost solution for netbooks and ultraportables that want thinness, cheapness and capacity. The drives will come in 160GB and 250GB configurations, both with 8MB of cache and spinning at 5,400RPM on the SATA 3Gb/s interface. OEMs should start seeing these drives early next year, with laptops to follow.

Today Seagate has announced that it will be launching the first 2TB drive to implement the new SATA 6Gb/s technology (aka SATA 3). The 2TB Barracuda XT is set to use four 500GB platters spinning at 7200 RPM, will have 64MB cache and should have a maximum transfer rate of around 140 MB/s. Other than that, the drive will use the SATA 6Gb/s interface and will be fully backwards compatible with SATA 3Gb/s and SATA 1.5GB/s

The drive will hit the streets later this week for around US$299, and will be perfect for those new P55 motherboards supporting the SATA 6Gb/s interface

This isn’t the first 2TB desktop hard drive that Western Digital has released, that title went to the 2TB Caviar Green back in January. The problem with the Caviar Green hard drives was that the platter spun at a slower 5400RPM so WD has released some faster, 7200RPM 2TB drives – the Caviar Black and RE4.

Both hard drives use a four platter array with 64MB cache, run off the SATA 3Gbps interface and an integrated dual processor. The RE4 is designed to be for enterprise users needing some long-term reliability with the drive promising 1.2 million hours MTBF, a “multi-axis” shock sensor so the drives stop when it gets knocked and Active Power Save.

Prices are currently at US$299 for the 2TB Caviar Black but the RE4 is still in OEM qualification so it is yet to receive a price tag.

You don’t often hear about what TDK is doing in the hard drive world, but today we actually do. TDK produces read/write HDD heads for some hard drive producers, and is currently producing 500GB/platter heads for our desktop hard drives. However, according to a leaked roadmap, TDK has some 640GB/platter heads in the OEM testing phase, with mass production slated for early 2010.

With 640GB per platter we could be seeing manufacturers releasing 4-platter, 3.5-inch 2.5TB drives. Manufacturers could also up this by releasing a 3.2TB 5-platter drive, but this is less likely. As usual with all new technology, the 2.5TB drives will probably cost 3 or 4 times as much as a single 1TB drive.

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This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen a 500GB platter, but it sure is great to see some more hard drives adopting a faster way to access data. By reducing the amount of platters there is less work required in moving a head to the data. This advantage can give up to 30% greater performance over a 3-platter hard drive, which is good news for performance buffs.

Anyway, Samsung debuted their latest 1TB Spinpoint F3 HDD that utilises two 500GB platters as mentioned above, as well as a 500GB edition. The hard drives use the standard 3.5″ form factor, spin at a normal 7,200 RPM and have 16 or 32 MB buffer cache. According to Samsung, the 500GB model is available now with the 1TB version slated for a release next month.

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Ok, so we all know Western Digital, and we all know their hard drives. Well, it’s that time again where WD releases a first of something, last time being a 2TB 3.5″ desktop HDD, and this time – a laptop-designed 2.5-inch 1 terabyte hard drive.

Under the name of Scorpio Blue 1TB and Scorpio Blue 750GB, these drives have already been released and shipped to manufacturers. Unfortunately these drives are a bit thicker than usual, being 12.5mm thick rather than the usual 9.5mm; this means most laptops can’t have one of these installed in their regular HDD slots. But, of course, you can always chuck them inside external hard drives, which is what WD is releasing them in

For US$189.99 you can grab a 750GB My Passport SE and for US$249.99 you can grab the 1TB version. Still, it’s only a matter of time before Alienware will chuck them in their high-end gaming laptops

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