First 1TB Drive with SAS Interface, From Seagate

Seagate announced it has begun worldwide shipment of its 1 terabyte (TB)
enterprise-class Barracuda ES.2 hard drives with a Serial Attached
SCSI (SAS) interface. Applications addressing rich media content and
collaborative applications like email can benefit from the average 135%
performance boost over SATA-interface drives along with robust
enterprise features and native compatibility.

“The explosion of
content in enterprise environments is driving the need for faster data
access and bandwidth that Seagate’s 1TB Barracuda ES.2 drives can
deliver with a SAS interface,” said Sherman Black, Seagate senior vice
president and general manager, Seagate Enterprise Compute Business.
“SAS dual-port capability with redundancy, improved performance and
data integrity make this drive the perfect low-cost/GB enterprise-ready
drive for our customers.”

SAS also enables greater
system-design and integration flexibility for solution providers who
are eager to offer even greater value options to their customers. “The
higher performance and inherently lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
make Barracuda ES.2 drives with SAS a perfect choice for many of our
customers,” said Joe Cousins, vice president, Marketing at Bell
Microproducts. “With the added enterprise features found within SAS all
merging into a lower-cost package, we anticipate our customers will be
very interested in building and deploying SAS-based systems with
Seagate drives.”

With the introduction of the Barracuda ES.2
drive, Seagate is first to provide customers with a SAS interface
option in addition to its SATA model, which began shipping last year.
For major system providers including HP, SAS offers greater levels of
data integrity and performance for business-critical and nearline
enterprise environments.

“As a leader in the enterprise, HP
ProLiant servers and storage technologies help customers to manage
their datacenter infrastructure with confidence,” said Ron Noblett,
vice president, Industry Standard Servers, HP. “We’re pleased to align
with Seagate for their hard drive expertise as the new SAS 1TB drive is
added to the HP portfolio of Midline drives. These drives will provide
the ‘pennies per GB economics’ of SATA Midline with additional
performance as well as the dual port capability our external storage
customers demand.”

The Barracuda ES.2 hard drive with SAS is
optimized for business-critical and nearline enterprise storage
environments that demand native enterprise host compatibility. This
means no SATA interposer card costs and complexity, along with all the
advantages including dual-port, full duplex capability and a host of
enterprise class features for high system-level performance and
reliability.

Seagate’s PowerTrim technology is integrated into
the Barracuda ES.2 drive family and dynamically manages drive power
consumption at all levels of activity. With PowerTrim technology, the
Barracuda ES.2 drive addresses the IT dilemma facing energy-constrained
data centers by delivering a 20% reduction in overall drive power
consumption and a best-in-class 55% reduction in watts-per-gigabyte.
And moving to SAS gives customers up to 38% improvement in
IOPs-per-Watt over SATA.

The Barracuda ES.2 drive family’s
robust features stand out in performance, reliability, capacity, and
energy efficiency. Among them is its new RVFF (Rotational Vibration
Feed Forward) system, designed to sustain performance in densely-packed
multi-drive systems. The Barracuda ES.2 drive also boosts reliability
with an industry-best unrecoverable error rate that is 10 times better
than desktop class drives and a 1.2 million hour Mean Time Between
Failure at full 24×7 data availability.

The Barracuda ES.2
drive family operates at 7,200-rpm spin speeds, delivers average seek
times of 8.5ms, and delivers up to 1TB of capacity with other models
available in 500GB and 750GB. It includes Seagate’s industry-leading
five-year limited warranty.

Seagate Technology