500 GB Hitachi

[Bozo]

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,120102,pg,1,00.asp

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Pradeep]

Sweet. Just the thing to attach to my HD DVR after placing in an external enclosure.

 

[sechs]

Is this a three platter or five platter design?

 

[Gilbo]

It's a five platter design.

 

[sechs]

Considering that there aren't massive complaints about the 7k400, I'd say that Hitachi is going to keep grabbing that capacity crown with five platters. Will anyone else follow suit?

 

[LunarMist]

Seagate has a 500GB drive.

 

[Gilbo]

Considering that there aren't massive complaints about the 7k400, I'd say that Hitachi is going to keep grabbing that capacity crown with five platters. Will anyone else follow suit?

The nice thing, from their perspective, is that it gives them a place to throw lower density-capable heads. They've got a 500GB capacity with 100GB platters.

Lunarmist, are you sure Seagate's drive is 500GB and not 400GB? I thought Seagate's line topped out with a three platter, 133GB/platter, 400GB model? I'm pretty confident that Hitachi are the only people still making >3 platter designs, and no one has 166GB platters yet.

 

[CityK]

See Free's post. I would deduce that either:

1) he forgot whether the drive's capacity was 400 or 500 GB
2) they have 500 GB
3) he had access to the Hitachi 500 GB

My bet is on 2.

 

[Splash]

...Lunarmist, are you sure Seagate's drive is 500GB and not 400GB?...

There "is" a Seagate 500 GB SATA drive, but it hasn't been released quite yet. It was announced last year. This will NOT be a so-called "desktop" SATA hard drive, instead an "enterprise" SATA hard drive (ala Maxtor MaxLine).

One of the kickers with this drive will be that it will allegedly be the first hard drive released with the super-secret FATA interface. FATA = Fibre ATA. Yes, that's a SATA drive that uses a fibre-optic interface instead of a copper differential interface. It will also have a MTBF of 1.4 million hours. Unfortunately, for the performance freaks out there, it will spin at 7200 RPM, not 10k, 12k or 15kRPM.

This will be the first of a line of Seagate drives, possibly with a new name distinct from Cheetah and Barracuda, that will be classified as "enterprise ATA" -- actually SATA and FATA for sure, maybe parallel ATA-100, but not SCSI (or SAS, or F-C).

This new 500 GB drive was supposed to be out during Q1 of 2005. We just entered Q2 of 2005. Hello!!! Where the hell are you!!! Oh, well. There are probably a few thousand of these 500 GB Seagate Falcons, Eagles, Tigres, Vipers, Stallions, Cobras, Unicorns, Ospreys, Bison, Rabid Mullet or whatever they might be called, spinning away in the final stages of a large-scale verification test as we speak. Maybe management is holding these drives up from release until they can come up with a mascot namesake.