Seagate Announces World's Fastest And Slimmest 2.5-inch HDD
Seagate is trying to make mechanical hard drives sexy again and it's doing it with a new thin and fast 2-terabyte mobile HDD for laptop applications. According to Seagate, its new drive is the planet's first and only 2TB capacity HDD offered a scant 7mm capacity, which is the same thickness as a typical solid state drive (SSD).
At only 3.17 ounces, it's also light—25 percent lighter than Seagate's previous generation of mobile HDDs, the company says. More than just bragging rights, notebook manufacturers have been on a mission to offer customers increasingly thin and light designs. Seagate's new drive allows them to continue to do so, while also offering customers more capacity per dollar than what they'd get with an SSD.
"In an industry first, our engineers have been able to boost areal density to 1TB per platter in a 2.5-inch form factor, allowing our OEM customers the flexibility to design and build virtually any kind of laptop they can envision, with plenty of storage to boot," said Matt Rutledge, Seagate’s senior vice president, client storage. "Laptops today must satisfy consumer demand for fast computing and high capacity storage capabilities on one hand, while also offering compelling designs and slim styling on the other. With the introduction of Seagate’s new Mobile HDD, laptop manufacturers no longer need to make tradeoffs between these seemingly competing mandates."
Rutledge's claim hinges on customers valuing storage space over raw performance and cost. Equipped with a SATA 6Gbps interface and a beefy 128MB of cache, Seagate's new 2TB offering is rated to deliver up to 100MB/s of sustainable transfers. That's serviceable, but not quite in the same league as a 2.5-inch SSD, many of which are rated to deliver sequential read and write performance of more than 500MB/s.
Be that as it may, there's a value proposition to be had here, especially for systems that need lots of storage space, A 2TB drive such as this one is capable of storing over 200,000 photos, 250,000 songs, or 124 hours of HD video, Seagate says.
Seagate is also offering a 1TB variant, though it didn't say how much either capacity drive costs.
At only 3.17 ounces, it's also light—25 percent lighter than Seagate's previous generation of mobile HDDs, the company says. More than just bragging rights, notebook manufacturers have been on a mission to offer customers increasingly thin and light designs. Seagate's new drive allows them to continue to do so, while also offering customers more capacity per dollar than what they'd get with an SSD.
"In an industry first, our engineers have been able to boost areal density to 1TB per platter in a 2.5-inch form factor, allowing our OEM customers the flexibility to design and build virtually any kind of laptop they can envision, with plenty of storage to boot," said Matt Rutledge, Seagate’s senior vice president, client storage. "Laptops today must satisfy consumer demand for fast computing and high capacity storage capabilities on one hand, while also offering compelling designs and slim styling on the other. With the introduction of Seagate’s new Mobile HDD, laptop manufacturers no longer need to make tradeoffs between these seemingly competing mandates."
Rutledge's claim hinges on customers valuing storage space over raw performance and cost. Equipped with a SATA 6Gbps interface and a beefy 128MB of cache, Seagate's new 2TB offering is rated to deliver up to 100MB/s of sustainable transfers. That's serviceable, but not quite in the same league as a 2.5-inch SSD, many of which are rated to deliver sequential read and write performance of more than 500MB/s.
Be that as it may, there's a value proposition to be had here, especially for systems that need lots of storage space, A 2TB drive such as this one is capable of storing over 200,000 photos, 250,000 songs, or 124 hours of HD video, Seagate says.
Seagate is also offering a 1TB variant, though it didn't say how much either capacity drive costs.
