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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Taft12 - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
I often wondered if it there was a harvesting process so that platters with flaws could use some smaller percentage of the platter?Sort of like a nasty scratch on a DVD-R or CD-R -- if it doesn't touch the part containing the data near the disc's centre, your data is still good.
Does it work this way? If both platters truly are A-OK, could you "unlock" a 750GB drive into 1TB? I suppose not or someone would have surely done this before now...
tygrus - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
The sequential read doesn't look very smooth. Is this a problem with the timing method, request pattern, test system, OS driver, disk cache, disk firmware or SATA implementation ???Are the tracks so small and wobbly that it has too wait to re-align, re-read data or read another location due to lower data/signal quality ?
xcomvic - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Good old mechanical Hard drives are still stepping up, even in this SSD day and age... Let me tell you what I would give for a 1TB Crucial M4 for under 200 bucks right about now:)Exodite - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
To be fair though, right now SSDs look straight up economical compared to the HDD prices... :(rlandess - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
"Let me tell you what I would give for a 1TB Crucial M4 for under 200 bucks right about now:) "I'm guessing under $200.
RU482 - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Oooo Oooo....I know!!!Under 200 bucks
/what do I win?
vectorm12 - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
The current Barracuda XT drives I own (8) have had a terrible trackrecord with my Adaptec 2840 raidcontroller. Despite FW-updates and whatnot.I'd love to get rid of my 8 1TB Samsung F4s and replace them with 8 2TB drives from this line.
However I'm slightly worried Seagate and Adaptec simply don't play nice.
Taft12 - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Are non-enterprise drives even certified on those controllers?WD RE4 and the like always work with hardware RAID controllers. They cost a bit more of course, but you were willing to shell out for an 8-port RAID controller, right...?
mtverlander - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
I was hoping for a 2-platter 2TB drive, but it looks like these guys use 3 less-dense platters. EXPLAIN!Golgatha - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Actually I was wondering the same thing. A 2 platter 2TB drive would be fast and cool running.