Seagate Technology has announced today the launch of its Barracuda 7200.11 and Barracuda ES.2 one-terabyte capacity hard drives that are designed for use with consumer and enterprise-class computers.
The announcement comes off the heels of Hitachi’s release of its one-terabyte hard drive.
The Barracuda 7200.11 and Barracuda ES.2 hard drives are set for global release during the third quarter of this year, where shipping will begin between July and September.
Melissa Johnson, product marketing manager of personal compute business at Seagate, says today’s desktop capacity has increased by 55 times compared to 10 years ago, where the highest capacity was only a 15GB disc drive. Although now armed with larger storage space, Seagate thinks it will not take long for its users to fill it up to capacity.
“With high definition movies, adding in your games, music, e-mails and operating system, you’re quickly at the terabyte capacity already,” Johnson said. “With our new hard drives, customers don’t need to purge anything on their computers. They can keep it all.”
To help store more information onto the disc drives, Seagate began using perpendicular recording technology last year. This move made the company the first in the world to do this on a desktop hard drive.
“Perpendicular recording technology is where the industry’s moving worldwide,” Johnson said.
The Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive comes packed with features such as 105MBs of sustained data rate, as well as four disc heads, and an areal density of 250GB per disk. The estimated retail price for the drive is $399.99.
Designed for the enterprise class is the Barracuda ES.2, a hard drive that offers users 33 per cent more capacity than its predecessor, the Barracuda ES. Also featured with the new hard drive is Seagate PowerTrim power management tool, an automatic power savings tool that also aids in system cooling requirements by disabling read/write electronics during inactive activity times.
Seagate realizes the importance of its channel partner community and the importance of successful deployment, so it has established a global partner program, where incentives and rebates are made available to its partners.
“We have a quarterly rebate program,” Johnson said. “And we offer online training for partners and we also do Internet seminars. For system builders, we give them priority access to pre and post sales support.”
In dedication to its channel community, Seagate also has a five-year warranty on all of its configurations, PCs, notebooks and entry servers.
