1-Tbyte Bragging Rights

5:05 PM -- Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) moved closer to its goal of matching competitor Seagate in the enterprise disk drive market.

As HGST said it would do last month, the vendor unveiled a 2.5-inch "small form factor" disk drive for consumer gear and servers; a 15,000-rpm, 300-Gbyte 3.5-inch SAS drive for enterprise OEMs; and a 3.5-inch, 7,200-rpm SATA drive with a 1-Tbyte capacity. (See HGST Hoists High Hopes and Short Ride to 1-Tbyte Drives.)

That last bit is key for HGST. While the 2.5-inch drive and the 300-Gbyte SAS drive put HGST on par with its Seagate, the 1-Tbyte SATA drive could put HGST ahead of its chief rival in some markets, depending on when the product is actually delivered.

HGST said its newly released products will ship sometime in the second quarter. Seagate says it will release 1-Tbyte drives in "a couple of months."

Meanwhile, Seagate insisted its 1-Tbyte drive will be better engineered. A Seagate spokesman last month told Byte and Switch that his company's drives will consume less power, budget, and array real estate than those of HGST.Of course, none of this can be proven, since neither drive is yet in the hands of anyone willing to talk about it.

So the race is on, but not only for actual product delivery. The world needs to see the potential each of the 1-Tbyte drives has in enterprise equipment, and which OEMs will queue up where. It's a race we're watching with interest.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch