AfterDawn: News

Seagate won't introduce 2TB hard drives for a few months

Seagate has announced a new line of drives that are slated to offer a capacity of 2 trillion Bytes (2TB) - eventually. The first Constellation drives are expected to start shipping sometime during the first quarter of this year. But unlike the Western Digital Caviar Green drives which can already be pre-ordered from many vendors, the actual 2TB capacity Seagate drives may not ship until late summer.

The 2.5" drives to be released first will feature capacities up to 500GB and be offered with either a SATA or SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) interface. Like Western Digital, Seagate is promoting their new drives' power efficiency. As of yet though it's difficult to make a comparison between the two since Seagate hasn't released many specifics.



Based on what little information is available on their website the new drives appear to be comparable to or slightly worse than Western Digital's existing drive lines. While they claim their new PowerChoice techology gives them "the highest power-reduction savings ever offered in an enterprise-class HDD," looking at the specs for their current products that makes sense. They already appear to use about 20% more power than comparable Western Digital units.

So basically Seagate has announced that they'll be releasing hard drives which feature the same capacity as Western Digital's new models, but will likely continue to use more power. Unless you're a die hard Seagate fan or require a SAS interface it's probably no big deal.

Written by: Rich Fiscus @ 3 Feb 2009 11:56

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• 9 comments

• sgriesch

  Good. They haven't gotten the 1 TB hard drives down just yet. Waiting on my replacement currently.

  3.2.2009 13:20 #1

• ZippyDSM

  ya they need to hold off till they get the bugs worked out...

  3.2.2009 13:54 #2

• xugiua

  Ya, I trust WD a lot more than Seagate anyway, they can take their time if they want, I'll have a couple WD 2 Terabytes before they get theirs out.

  3.2.2009 16:18 #3

• blueboy09

  Originally posted by ZippyDSM: ya they need to hold off till they get the bugs worked out... I agree. The sit and wait approach is effective, especially when regards to faulty drives that Seagate has recently released. Now if only I could get my hands on a 2TB WD . . .

  4.2.2009 04:33 #4

• wdtv

  Damn, does this mean my Seagate 1.5 tb external is faulty?

  4.2.2009 11:54 #5

• avoidz

  I still want to trust Seagate drives, but I'll wait and see what happens with those 1TB and 2TB ones before shelling out the dollars.

  6.2.2009 08:13 #6

• sgriesch

  I just got my replacement under warranty yesterday, and it's a repaired drive, not a new one. This doesn't make my oppinion any better.
  Glad to hear that it's not just me having issues with them. I have purchased 2 Seagates and they have both crashed. 1 Hitachi and it crashed. Only 1 Western Digital crashed out of at least 7 that I owned.

  6.2.2009 09:11 #7

• barryware

  I have had three (3) seagate 1tb+ drives fail in the past 10 - 12 weeks or so. Two 1tb and one 1.5.
  
  They finally addmitted they have a problem and have recently published a firmware upgrade. I applied the firmware to my drives that qualify. We'll see.

  6.2.2009 09:11 #8

• zorb43

  Originally posted by wdtv: Damn, does this mean my Seagate 1.5 tb external is faulty?Well as they say it takes a very hungrey man to pick the maggots off his meat and then eat it as opposed to tossing it out ... these drives use a new technology using vertical alignment so it may take a while to work out the bugs.I for one usually like to wait 6 months to a year before I try them out. This also gets you the benefits of the subsequent price reductions ... Just a thought ...

  8.2.2009 17:59 #9