Ladies and gentlemen, today we have to celebrate. Well, not all of us, because those guys at Western Digital or other big HDD manufacturers don't have anything to celebrate. In fact, all those into this industry should bow their heads and kneel before Seagate, the first hard drive manufacturer to hit the 1 billion shipped units mark!


In 29 years, Seagate managed to sell about 79,000,000 TB of storage space, enough to keep almost 160 billion hours of video content or 1.2 trillion hours of music compressed in the MP3 format. The countdown started with the ST506 drive, pictured above, with 5MB of storage, and now their largest drives have no less than 1TB of space!

According to Bill Watkins, Seagate's CEO, "This company has an amazing, colorful and important history, which continues to be written every day by our 55,000 employees around the world. Al Shugart and a few others started the company behind a convenience store in 1979 and enabled the birth of the first PCs. Today we’re at the center of the digital content revolution. So reaching this milestone is a great opportunity for us to reflect on our accomplishments and those of our predecessors, and to also look forward to the great things we can still achieve as a company."

Need I say more? 1 Billion!!!

You certainly remember the Raptor HDD series from Western Digital, as they are still some of the fastest SATA drives on the market. A couple of years ago, SDDs appeared out of nowhere and somehow ruined WD’s and Seagate’s future plans (not that they were planning to come up with a sort of successor for the HDD format of their own).

So, if you need to have the fastest storage drives, you either choose the Raptor or whatever SDD you can get your hands on. Oh wait, those still cost a fortune… well, looks like you’re stuck with 7,200 RPM HDDs. Hm? What? WD has some new cheap Raptor variant?

The direct heir of the Raptor family is dubbed the Velociraptor, supposedly priced at around $300. It supports the 3GB/s SATA standard, has a capacity of 300GB, 16 MB cache and spins your data at 10,000 RPM, just like the previous Raptor. The new drive actually comes in a 2.5" size factor, but has a massive "Icepack" heatsink that makes it large enough to fit in a 3.5" bay.

Preliminary tests made by Maximum PC proved that Velociraptor is faster than the older Raptor or any other HDD in any
possible way. However, Maximum PC also tested it against a $1,950 Mtron Pro-series 64-gigabyte SSD and found out that WD’s little wonder can’t really compete with the SDD pack.

But hey, it’s only 300 bucks…. it doesn’t get more cost-effective than this. Come to think of it, it’s a 2.5” HDD so maybe you can rip that heatsink off and squeeze it into your laptop.

Boys and girls, this is not something you're going to play with at home, unless you have a server in the basement, and it doesn't provide an insane capacity either, but since when we talk about enterprise storage solutions, speed and reliability come in first place, I am not surprised to see that the largest hard drive for this market has "only" 450GB...


Coming from Hitachi, the Ultrastar 15K450 has the following technical specifications:

450GB (GB = 1 billion bytes, accessible capacity may be less)
183 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
4 platters, 8 recording heads
2090 Mb/s max. media data rate
3.6 ms average seek time (with command overhead)
15,000 RPM, 2.0 ms average latency
3Gb/s SAS, 4Gb/s FCAL interfaces
16 MB data buffer
25.8 mm in height (max)
750 in weight (max)
250 G/2 ms pulse non-operating shock
SAS: 13.3 watt idle power
FCAL: 13.4 watt idle power
3.7 Bels typical idle acoustics
5 to 55 degrees C operating temperature

Related to this product, Dean Amini, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies' director of enterprise market and strategy, says "With the higher capacity and performance of the Ultrastar 15K450, enterprises are able to address their throughput requirements using fewer drives, which reduces three things; the cost of ownership, the datacenter’s footprint and overall power requirements. Coupled with our intensive testing and quality assurance process, the Ultrastar 15K450 offers the highest available performance and reliability for mission-critical computing environment."

Nowadays, looks like everyone is in dire need of storage space. Video games in general tend to occupy more and more space, the rapidly propagating HD content eats GBs like crazy and even the supposedly friendly operating systems manifest a monopolistic approach on our poor HDDs. Good thing the TB HDDs are slowly becoming more affordable, but these solution could prove cumbersome if we somehow feel the need to connect more TB HDDs. Buffalo, on the other hand, took this problem into consideration and came up with some pretty small TB NAS devices.

Maybe you’ve seen some previous NAS HDDs. They are quite bulky and heavy nonetheless. But Buffalo managed to squeeze a 1TB HDD into an enclosure measuring 5.31 x 3.22 x 1.57 inches along with some other nice features. The Mini NAS device also integrates a Gigabit Ethernet port, supports RAID 0 and 1 arrays, includes Active Directory Support and it knows when to shut down in case of some unannounced power failure UPS support. All this, plus the fact that it runs an on-board TwonkyVision DLNA server.

The Mini NAS could prove perfect for consoles and remote access to media servers, but it’s supposed to set you back $699 and it will be available some time in May. Though it looks price, you won’t find anything as feature-packed as the Mini NAS for a lower cost.

Just when we thought it appropriate to make the leap for SSDs, pop goes Seagare with another improvement for the good ol’ HDDs. We might as well stick with HDDs for now because they still have the upper ground as far as prices are concerned.

Seagate seems to be hard at work to keep the HDDs alive as much as possible. Accordingly, they announced the brand new addition to the Cheetah hard drive family with the release of the first self-encrypting hard drive technology targeted at servers and storage arrays. OK, so these might not be for everyday PC users, but a marketing ploy to keep SDDs at bay. The latest addition is codenamed Cheetah 15K.6 FDE (Full Disk Encryption) and it offers full data encryption technology that encodes the data no matter where the drive is used, moved, stored or retired.

Now why would we need encryption in our PCs? Vista provides some encrypting stuff there, who needs hardware encryption? Yeah right, Vista… Seagate is aiming at delivering the tools that enterprise customers have needed for a long time. Namely, the enterprise people always get paranoid over the security of their stored data and they really need to keep those bits of info secured for the entire HDD life span.

Getting deeper into the hard coding technology, we find out that Cheetah 15K.6 uses an ASIC controller to handle the encryption of the drive transparently and there is no performance cost associated with the drive. Best of all, the encryption schemes are embedded on the hard drive so you needn’t change applications or the OS.

The Cheetah 15K.6 FDE lineup will soon be available in 450GB, 300GB, and 147GB sizes using the SAS or FC interfaces. Nothing on prices but these should hit your wallet a little harder than expected.