Seagate Ships 2TB Enterprise Drive

Seagate has started shipping a 2 terabyte enterprise-class drive for multi-drive, nearline storage environments.

The 3.5-inch Constellation ES, launched Monday, features 6 Gb-per-second serial-attached SCSI, or SAS, data-transfer technology. In targeting nearline storage, Seagate says it is going after the "fastest growing segment in enterprise storage."

Nearline storage is a term used to describe an intermediate type of data storage that falls between online storage, which provides speedy access to data, and offline storage, which is used for backups, archiving, and other long-term storage. Nearline storage technology retrieves data from a tape library or other device and makes it available online.

The new Seagate product is the fourth-generation Constellation ES drive. The enterprise-class drives run at 7200 revolutions per minute and are also available in capacities of 500 GB and 1 TB. The drives support up to 76 TB per square foot and offer data-transfer speeds of 6 Gb/s SAS or 3 Gb/s SATA.

"The Constellation ES drive tackles the concerns of shrinking IT budgets, floor space constraints and energy consumption, efficiently and cost-effectively," Carla Kennedy, VP of Seagate's enterprise product line, said in a statement.

Seagate introduced its first enterprise solid-state drive last December. The Pulsar, which is built for blade and general servers, is the first of what the company says will be a line of enterprise SSDs from the company.

The 2.5-inch drive has a SATA interface and is available with up to 200 GB of storage. It has a peak performance of up to 30,000 read input/output operations per second and 25,000 write IOPS. The SSD also has a read/write rate of 240 MB per second and 200 MB/s, respectively. The device comes with a five-year warranty.