The recent focus on perpendicular recording has finally moved to the desktop, with hard drive maker Seagate this week announcing that its Barracuda line of 3.5-inch drives has hit the 750GB capacity mark, thanks to the technology.
The company's new Barracuda 7200.10 family of internal drives -- the tenth generation of the lineup -- represents a number of firsts. For one thing, it marks the first time perpendicular technology has been implemented in 3.5-inch desktop PC drives.
Additionally, the seven new models offer unprecedented levels of areal capacity, the amount of data that can be squeezed onto a platter's surface area. The 750GB model offers up to 188GB of data per platter for an areal density of 130Gb per square inch.
Perpendicular recording technology, of course, works by orienting data bits vertically on a platter, where more can fit into a smaller area -- rather than horizontally, which was the technique central to previous-generation longitudinal recording. Perpendicular recording also boosts drive throughput without requiring increased spin speed -- since more data bits can pass under the drive head in the same amount of time.
The result is a new top capacity for the drive manufacturer's Barracuda line, and for the industry: The 750GB drive is the first 3.5-inch desktop PC drive of that capacity to ship, and the largest desktop drive to date.
While longitudinal recording remained the dominant technology in hard disk drives for 50 years, it's quickly being supplanted by perpendicular recording. Indeed, the launch of the Barracuda 7200.10 series means that Seagate now offers models using perpendicular recording technology across its desktop, notebook, enterprise, CE and retail hard drive lines. Just last week, Seagate added perpendicular technology to its 15,000 RPM Cheetah enterprise hard drive line, which comes in capacities up to 300GB.
\"On the desktop PC side, it took us a whole 50 years to get to the 500 GB capacity point,\" Seagate spokesman Michael Hall said. \"With the first iteration of perpendicular, we're increasing that top capacity by 50 percent, to 750GB.\"
The new Barracuda 7200.10 family includes seven 7200-RPM drives in capacities from 200GB to 750GB (one of which, a 300GB unit, is available only to system builders). Each model is available with either ATA100 or SATA 3.0Gb/s interfaces (with the full requisite feature set, including speed-enhancing Native Command Queuing.) Cache sizes range from 8MB on the low end to 16MB on models greater than 200GB.
The 7200.10's wide array of available models is designed to appeal to a similarly wide audience -- including casual PC users, workstation system builders, and small servers, said Joni Clark, product marketing manager for Seagate's Barracuda and Momentus product lines.
\"There are an incredible amount of usages out there for storage, not just consumer electronics, you see people ... with mp3 players, and with PVRs, there has to be something on the backend to archive and hold all the content that's created and being transferred around,\" Clark said. \"You need these large drives for the backend, for the PC, for digital media servers, so you couldn't just lock it down to four or five capacities, or one interface.\"
Besides perpendicular recording technology, an additional new feature in the drives helps read/write performance. Dubbed Adaptive Fly Height, the technology adjusts the height of the disk head in response to temperature changes -- since hotter temperatures can cause media and other materials to swell.
\"With Adaptive Fly Height, the drive understands when [it] is in a hot environment, versus a cool environment,\" Clark said. \"When it's hotter, things expand, and the read/write head rises. When it's cooler, the drive knows [it] can fly closer to the media. This helps keep our read/write performance consistent.\"
A second new addition, called Clean Sweep, helps reduce problems from surface irregularities caused by repeated rewriting to the same drive areas. During power-on, the drive passes the drive head over the platters, \"going across the pack and polishing the media,\" Clark said. It's important to smooth out irregularities, she added, since, \"when the head is flying pretty low, you can actually hit one.\"
A third key feature is an offline bad sector scan, which activates when the drive has been idle for some time. The drive automatically scans for any bad blocks, salvages what it can, and marks the bad sectors unusable. Because it activates only when idle, impact on normal drive usage is minimal.
The drives also all feature low-noise operation -- 27dB idle, 3.0dB seek -- and include Seagate's five-year warranty.
The new Barracuda line's 200GB SATA 3.0Gb/sec. model carries a recommended price tag of $104, while the top-of-the-line 750GB SATA 3.0Gb/sec. drive has a suggested price of $590 ($585 in a PATA version.)
In addition to the new internal drives, an external 750GB model is expected to be released on Monday.
