Seagate has been qualifying a
complete range of 1.0 TB hard drives -- though, I suspect the consumer version could have been released 2 or 3 months ago.
There's also the OEM factor with Seagate. They will substantially supply their contract customers like Dell, HP, Sun, EMC, NetApp, et cetera with drives for several weeks before the retail channel begins to get their first trickle.
Did anyone notice Seagate now offers 7200RPM drives with a SAS interface?
Yes! What's essentially a 3.5-inch SATA / ATA drive, but with a SAS interface. That's a second generation ES (ES.2) drive. Now if they would only do the inverse: Put a SATA interface on a 15kRPM drive.
I have a 320 GB SATA Barracuda ES (think ES.1) drive that I bought about six months ago for use as a hot-plug SATA drive to perform weekly full backups with. I already had an Hitachi 250 GB SATA drive for backups, but I ended up repurposing the Hitachi as standard data-only volume. At the time I bought mine, the 320 GB SATA Barracuda ES cost an extra $20. After using this drive for a while now, I'd say it was $20 well spent! My 320 GB SATA Barracuda ES is extremely quiet when getting fed data straight off my 15kRPM SAS Cheetak 15K.4 drives. The Hitachi was quiet too, but I could still barely make out access thrashing. The Barracuda ES is inaudible during the same activity. I suspect the ES series may very well be cherry-picked Barracuda drive mechanism with the ES firmware tweak. In any case, the drive operates as fast as the Hitachi Deskstar (HDT7225250LA380) during backups and it comes out of my SAS SCA drive bay noticeably cooler than the Hitachi.