Seagate Unveils its First 1TB Hard Disk Drive - Only half a year late

After some months in which nothing new came out of Seagate's door, on Thursday the hard disk drive manufacturer silently began to ship its 1TB (1000GB) hard disk drive (HDD) to large retailers and partners. Unfortunately this 1TB unit comes in about half an year late after the launch of Hitachi's Deskstar/Cinemastar 7K1000.

However performance-wise, the new Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 uses a 16MB buffer and four 250GB platters. That puts it slightly ahead Hitachi's unit in terms of storage space per platter but trails behind the 7K1000 in buffer size (16MB vs. 32MB). The fact that it only uses a 4-head/8-platter setup helps it achieve 180Gb/ square inch which is a noticeable improvement over 148Gb/s which is the current storage index for the 7K1000.

Evidently, Hitachi's unit uses 5 platters and 10 heads in order to achieve the same storage space. However that doesn't mean the 7200.10 pulls out better numbers. Actually Seagate's unit consumes 13W while Hitachi's HDD draws about 13.6W when running in full load. Acoustics are even better on Hitachi's unit (3.2 bells vs 3.7 bells for the 7200.10).

Regarding the launch of Seagate's new 1TB hard disk drive, Brian Dexheimer, chief sales and marketing officer for Seagate stated: "Seagate remains focused on leading the hard drive’s pivotal transition to perpendicular recording technology and maintaining our areal density leadership in order to meet our customers’ growing storage capacity and reliability needs. This product's leading areal density epitomizes our efforts to deliver technologies that are unmatched in allowing organizations and consumers to store, protect and share digital content."

Currently there is no expected MSRP since the new HDD won't be available stores for about a month or so. For example, Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB has manufacturer suggested retail price (MSRP) of $399 while the new 750GB unit from Western Digital is even cheaper in terms of price /GB ($249 MSRP for a single unit). Let's just hope that the first benchmarks make it worth the money. Cause I'm pretty sure it won't come cheaper than the 7K1000.