Seagate Ships 1-TB 'Barracuda' SAS Drive

Seagate on Monday said it has started shipping a 1-TB enterprise-class hard disk drive with a SAS interface.

The Barracuda ES.2 targets applications that store multimedia content and collaborative applications, such as e-mail. Seagate claims the SAS, serial-attached SCSI interface delivers an average 135% performance boost over SATA-interface drives. SATA stands for serial advanced technology attachment.

SATA and SAS are data transfer technologies. SATA is a computer bus primarily designed for moving data between a computer and mass storage devices. SAS is primarily designed to move data to and from computer storage devices, such as hard drives and tape drives. Updated SAS technology is expected to ship next year that will double the present speed to 6 Gbps. The drives are expected to be compatible with second-generation SATA drives.

Seagate also offers SATA hard drives, which the company started shipping last year. The new SAS model targets applications that need faster data transfer rates to move large amounts of information.

Seagate has integrated its PowerTrim technology into the Barracuda ES.2 for power management at all levels of activity. The new drive also includes Seagate's rotational vibration feed forward system, which is designed to sustain performance in densely packed multidrive systems.

The Barracuda ES.2 also has an unrecoverable error rate that is substantially improved over desktop-class drives with an average time between failures of 1.2 million hours at 24/7 data availability. The drive operates at 7,200 revolutions per minute and has average seek times of 8.5 milliseconds.

The Barracuda ES.2 is also available in 500-GB and 750-GB models. The drive family includes a five-year limited warranty. Seagate announced shipping the new drives at Storage Networking World in Orlando, Fla. The Barracuda ES.2 was first unveiled in June.