Seagate Announces the First SATA 6Gb/s 2TB Drive
by Gary Key on September 21, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Gary's First Looks
Seagate is launching the industry's first 6Gb/s7200rpm 2TB hard drive today. The 2TB Barracuda XT contains a four platter design sporting 500GB each and rotating at 7,200 RPM. Seagate is including a new 64MB cache scheme, five-year warranty, maximum sustained transfer rate of ~140MB/s, and an estimated street price of $299. The drives should be available later this week in the retail channel.
The big news is full support for the SATA 6G interface along with auto-configure support for the older SATA 1.5 or 3Gb/s interfaces. Seagate is also launching a new version of their SeaTools software that will allow users to short stroke the drives for increased performance, at the cost of capacity.
Of course, one might be wondering where the SATA 6G controllers are right now. It turns out that Marvell is finally ready to start shipping their 88SE9123 controllers after several delays due to a variety of problems, most centering on dual controller designs planned for several motherboard updates in the next 60 days. We expect to see the first native SATA 6G implementation on a Southbridge from AMD early next year.
In the meantime, ASUS will be shipping their P7P55D Premium shortly with the Marvell 9123 chipset. This board features a PEX PLX8613 PCIe bridge chip that will convert four of the PCIe x1 lanes (250MB/s each) into two 500MB/s lanes. While still short of the maximum theoretical 600MB/s transfer speed of the SATA 6G specification, it will provide enough burst bandwidth for these first generation 6G hard drives. Expect to see Marvell 9123 equipped boards from Gigabyte in the near future.
We will be comparing the Barracuda XT 2TB drive to the latest WD Caviar Black 2TB shortly.
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afkrotch - Monday, September 21, 2009 - link
Rip your DVDs into a format that either the 360 or PS3 can read. From there, you can just use the console as your front end.usacodeman - Monday, September 21, 2009 - link
I would. I'm feeling the squeeze on a 1.5tb drive now...iwodo - Monday, September 21, 2009 - link
Come On. We need some super speedy SSD. Last time i heard there are already SSD in Lab doing 700MB/s waiting for SATA 3.0....Any news on that?
kjboughton - Monday, September 21, 2009 - link
Hey, what's the operating temperature range specification?omgroflmfao - Monday, September 21, 2009 - link
[quote]May-60[/quote]MS Office auto replaces "05" with "May" in certain situations.
I'm assuming, then, that the operating temp spec is 5 to 60 C.
This seems to be fairly standard.
I guess the editor is out on vacation. Oh wait...what editor?
TGressus - Monday, September 21, 2009 - link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76p_ncbffCE">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76p_ncbffCEAeternum - Monday, September 21, 2009 - link
"While still short of the maximum theoretical 600MB/s transfer speed of the SATA 6G specification, it will provide enough burst bandwidth for these first generation 6G hard drive"Well i dont believe anyone expects to hit the theoretical maximum anyway so 500 will just have to do :) Anyway this will be awesome for my home server in 6 months when the price drops and the mobo's are set up with the new 6G.
Doormat - Monday, September 21, 2009 - link
If I can buy an SSD next summer that does 500MB/s read and write, I'm not going to complain that its not 600MB/s.Anonymous Freak - Monday, September 21, 2009 - link
SATA 2.0 (aka SATA 3Gb/s) had a few improvements other than just raw data transfer speed going for it. Does SATA 6Gb/s have any other improvements?If not, then what is the point of this drive having the new connection, when the maximum transfer rate from the platters to the host isn't even 1.5Gb/s, much less 3?
On the newer SSDs, where raw data transfer rates are getting high enough to saturate SATA 3Gb/s, it makes sense to move to 6GB/s, but not for 7200 RPM spinning media. Even 15,000 RPM spinning drives can't even get close to 3 Gb/s. (And barely exceed 1.5Gb/s.)
afkrotch - Monday, September 21, 2009 - link
[quote]If not, then what is the point of this drive having the new connection, when the maximum transfer rate from the platters to the host isn't even 1.5Gb/s, much less 3?On the newer SSDs, where raw data transfer rates are getting high enough to saturate SATA 3Gb/s, it makes sense to move to 6GB/s, but not for 7200 RPM spinning media. Even 15,000 RPM spinning drives can't even get close to 3 Gb/s. (And barely exceed 1.5Gb/s.) [/quote]
Becausing only making one interface is cheaper than making 3 different interfaces. Why make Sata 1.5, Sata 3.0, and Sata 6.0, when you can just making Sata 6.0.
If all we cared about is whether or not a hdd can push the bus, we'd still be sitting on PATA 133.