Seagate Introduces New 1TB-Per-Platter Barracuda, Solid State Hybrid Version Coming
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 1, 2011 8:00 AM ESTYesterday Seagate had three members of its Barracuda family of 3.5" hard drives: the Barracuda Green, Barracuda, and Barracuda XT. Today, all three lines are being folded under the Barracuda name. The Barracuda Green drives will cease production in February 2012. The Barracuda XT, Seagate's flagship 3.5" drive, will eventually be replaced by a solid state Hybrid drive at some point in the future. Until then, if you want a 3.5" hard drive from Seagate - it'll just be called a Barracuda.
The new Barracuda lineup is top-to-bottom 7200RPM. Seagate makes up for the extra power required to spin at 7200RPM (vs 5900RPM for the Green drives) by moving to 1TB platters and a faster cache. Increasing platter density has been the preferred route of increasing performance in hard drives over the past decade, causing spindle speeds to stagnate but sequential transfer rates to increase steadily. The new 1TB-per-platter Barracuda disks are no exception. Despite not carrying the XT label, the new 3TB drive is capable of noticeably higher sequential read/write speeds compared to the outgoing Barracuda XT.
Seagate also updated the controller (now built on a 40nm process) and DRAM (now up to 64MB of DDR2) on the new Barracuda line. The 1TB platter drives are available in 1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB and 3TB capacities. Their prices and model numbers are below:
| Seagate's 1TB-per-platter Barracuda Lineup | ||||
| Model Number | Capacity | MSRP | ||
| ST3000DM001 | 3TB | $179.99 | ||
| ST2000DM001 | 2TB | $105.99 | ||
| ST1500DM001 | 1.5TB | $83.99 | ||
| ST1000DM003 | 1TB | $71.99 | ||
We'll have a full review of the new 3TB flagship drive later today.
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Qapa - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Well, as for hybrid drives, what is interesting is 2.5'' drives, for laptops, not drive for desktops where you usually have space for multiple drives anyway...kyuu - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
Er... Hybrid drives are a great replacement for a regular mass storage drives if you have any performance sensitive applications on them at all (like games you can't fit on the SSD, etc.). Also, a lot of people are still put off by SSDs because of $/GB and/or the hassle of managing programs/ data between two drives.Granted, HDD prices are going to need to come back down for a hybrid drive to be price competitive.
I'm definitely looking at picking one up to use as my secondary drive when they come out.
axp - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
Seagate always was making loud vibrating (and even faulty) HDDs, i guess this means they focus on their shortcomings now.Apart from the more than doubled prices per GB the new lineup seems completely uninteresting, seeing the 2TB variant being yet another noisy 3 platter design.
And look at that HDTach sheet, 55 mb minimum!! even my 8 year old hdds do better than that!
130mb average is not quite the ballpark i was looking for.
1,5TB was silent and cheap from Samsung almost 5 years ago.
I do hope the mergers fall through, Samsung and Hitachi are needed for a healthy HDD market.
This is a huge letdown, considering we finally got to 1TB per platter, artificially castrating the product lineup for margins just stinks.
iwod - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
Why are manufacture not putting out 4 TB drive? I am guessing Is because they are saving it for latter since both Patterned Media and Heat Assisted Tech arent mature yet and we are at least another 2 - 3 years away from them?With current tech PMR we have reach the limit of it, or we could properly squeeze out 10 - 20% per platter with some technology on the Head rather then platter. But PMR has reach its life.
And it is a funny move since HDD price is raising fast they dont even need to do any new products to drive sales.
jdietz - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
3TB - $0.0602TB - $0.053
1.5TB - $0.560
1TB - $0.072
mailman65er - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
When are we going to see a review and comparison of some real caching solutions like intel SRT, Dataplex cache, and compare it to Seagate Hybrids (momentus 1 and momentus 2?)...I pretty much have to buy an OCZ Synapse if I want a decent caching solution today.