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Revenue Growth Makes Seagate More Confident about SSD Offerings

Bart Salisbury — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:00:47 -0500

Seagate’s first quarter marked a reversal for the hard drive manufacturer. While overall revenues are 12 percent lower for the first quarter of 2010 than they were for the first quarter of 2009, Seagate realized a $179 million profit, up threefold from the first quarter of 2009.

Seagate shipped 46.3 million disk drives during the quarter, up 14 percent over the previous quarter, but down some four percent from the previous year. Still, Seagate CEO Steve Luczo is a happy camper: "The company has returned to its operating model well ahead of our expectations of six months ago and now expects to sustain gross margin of 22-26 per cent.”

Seagate is confident enough in it’s financial position to start a more aggressive push on its line of Solid State Drives (SSDs). These SATA-interfaced SSDs will be targeted initially to businesses, particular in the broad volume server market. Seagate is not looking at SSDs as replacements for hard drives. In fact, Seagate will be promoting it’s new single-platter 2.5-inch drive, which sits a mere 7 mm high, for upcoming ultra-thin notebooks, such as the Dell Adamo XPS.

Image Credit: überpulse

Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB

Nathan Edwards — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:30:00 -0500

Barracudas eat Caviar for breakfast

Update Oct 07, 2009: Fixed benchmark chart

We haven’t seen a new two-terabyte drive on the market in a while—not since we reviewed the Western Digital Caviar Green in May, in fact—but Seagate has finally added a 2TB drive to its Barracuda LP line of desktop drives. The LP (or low-power) line is Seagate’s “green” offering, equivalent to Western Digital’s GreenPower and Samsung’s EcoDrives. With an unusual 5,900rpm rotational speed—down from the 7,200rpm offered by the rest of the Barracuda line—the LP series trades performance for power savings and reduced heat output. Thankfully, it doesn’t sacrifice much speed in the process.

Unlike the performance-oriented Barracuda 7200.11 and 7200.12 series, the LP focuses on low power consumption, at both idle and full-spin states. We praised the low power consumption of Western Digital’s 2TB drive compared to the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11, but the LP series evens the playing field. On our test rig, the 2TB Barracuda drew around 4W at idle, slightly lower than the 2TB Caviar Green’s 5W, and 8W while operating, while the Caviar operated at around 9W. Both drives draw less power than the Barracudas of yore.

The Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB will restore the Barracuda name to users' good graces.

The 5,900rpm Barracuda LP handily outpaces the Caviar Green, which has a spindle speed somewhere between 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm. In our h2benchw tests, the 2TB Barracuda LP’s sustained average reads and writes were 20 percent faster than the Caviar Green’s—around 91MB/s compared to the WD drive’s 76MB/s. In fact, those times are more comparable to Seagate’s speedy 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11—the 2TB drive’s read speeds are slightly lower, and its write speeds slightly higher than the smaller drive’s.

Random-access times for the ’Cuda were a few milliseconds slower than those of the Caviar, at 13.2ms random read and 10.06ms random write latency. Its HDTach burst speed was 10 percent lower than the Caviar’s, at 196MB/s versus the Western Digital drive’s 218MB/s.

With even “green” drives catching up to the WD VelociRaptor in performance (random-access times aside) while offering eight times the storage for the price, it’s now both possible and easy to add colossal amounts of storage to your rig without compromising performance. Next year’s high-powered rigs will almost certainly have solid state drives for their operating systems, but they’ll still need high-capacity drives for the grunt work. And at $240 for 2TB of decently fast, low-power-draw storage, the Barracuda LP will find a home in many a PC.

Seagate Announces World's First 6Gbps SATA Hard Drive

Paul Lilly — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:51:47 -0500

Seagate today announced it has begun shipping what it claims is the "world's fastest, largest-capacity mainstream desktop hard drive" dubbed the Barracuda XT. While the Barracuda XT isn't the first 2TB hard drive to sport a 7200RPM spindle speed, it is the first one to feature a SATA 6Gb/s interface.

"Capacity and performance remain the defining attributes of hard drives for PC gamers, digital multimedia content developers, and many other customers requiring high-end systems at home and in the office," said Dave Mosley, executive vice president of Sales and Marketing at Seagate. "Seagate is meeting these requirements with the first 7200RPM desktop drive to combine 2TB of storage capacity with the fastest Serial ATA interface to date."

Seagate shoved four platters with an areal density of 368Gb per square inch inside the new Barracuda XT along with 64MB of cache for better burst performance and data transfer speeds. But it's the 6Gb/s interface that stands out on the spec sheet. Seagate says the Barracuda XT is fully backwards compatible with SATA 3Gb/s and 1.5Gb/s interfaces, but for those who want to take advantage of the additional bandwidth, a new motherboard is in order. Both Asus (P7P55D Premium) and Gigabyte (GA-P55-Extreme) have already jumped on board with 6Gb/s-capable motherboards.

Of course the biggest question on everyone's mind is are we at a point where a 6Gb/s interface is truly necessary? We spoke with Seagate's Product Marketing Director David Burks on the phone who told us that while desktop users have yet to saturate the SATA 3Gb/s interface, he expects that to change within the next two years. So in other words, don't expect double the performance over your current high-end hard drive. In the meantime, we're told that cache efficient and intensive applications are the best candidates to see an immediate benefit.

Image Credit: Seagate

Seagate Unveils FreeAgent Theater+

Jason Barry — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:15:21 -0500

Seagate announced the release of their new FreeAgent Theater+™ HD Media Player in a press release today. With a modest prices increase over the previous version--key features include 1080p HD, Dolby DTS, HDMI, network support, and new file-format compatibility.

The FreeAgent Theatre provides a turnkey solution to media center PCs, making it easy to explore media in your living room. The new device features the docking system developed for FreeAgent drives as well as two additional USB ports to attach any storage device to the player. Further, when attached to the network it can pull content from file shares, NAS devices, and the internet.

The new player is available immediately from Seagate.com and online retailers. To find a complete listing of features and specifications visit Seagate.com.

Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440

Nathan Edwards — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:00:01 -0500

A whole lotta NAS for a whole lotta dough

Last month we reviewed Western Digital’s MyBook World Edition, a small, white, single-drive, one-terabyte NAS box aimed solidly at Joe User. This month, we have the Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440, the MyBook’s polar opposite in many ways. It’s big, it’s black, it’s user-serviceable, comes with four Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB drives, and is marketed toward small businesses without a dedicated IT staff.

The BlackArmor 440 is a brick, the front of which has a two-line green LCD status screen, a front door that opens to reveal the four hot-swappable screwless drive bays, one of the box’s four USB 2.0 host ports, and a power button. The back holds the 12cm exhaust fan, the power jack (for the external power brick), two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and the other three USB 2.0 ports.

The LCD display offers system status information and a few buttons to navigate with, but the real power comes from the BlackArmor’s web interface, which is easily accessible from the BlackArmor Discovery software included with the NAS. The Discovery software also provides easy mapping of shared folders—the defaults are Public and Downloads.

The BlackArmor 440 is probably more NAS than a home network needs.

Via the web interface, admins can configure users’ quotas and permissions (including who can access the devices on each USB port); set up email alerts; set up, manage, and monitor the SMART status of drives and volumes; and turn on iTunes and media sharing and global access. Other options include FTP, HTTPS access (using your own SSL certificates or ones generated by the NAS), CIFS, NFS, Bonjour, and more.

One interesting feature is the ability to create multiple RAID arrays on the same drives. It’s a neat trick, but most users should stick with the single RAID 5 volume the 440 comes with.

One of the BlackArmor’s most useful inclusions is the BlackArmor Backup service, a custom app by Acronis. The 440 includes 10 full-version licenses, and more can be acquired from Seagate. For small-office users, that’s a lot of value.

In its default RAID 5 configuration, using one Gigabit Ethernet port, the 440 transfers files quickly. Copying a 2.79GB file from the NAS to a PC on the local network took two minutes and 38 seconds, while writing that file to the NAS took just over a minute. Connecting the other Ethernet port increases transfer speeds, but that port can also be used to make NAS-to-NAS backups or server backups.

After a week of testing, one of the 1.5TB drives in our review unit failed, so we got an opportunity to see the 440’s recovery process in action. The LCD screen and the web management panel both displayed alerts, and the RAID 5 was still functional, though degraded.

To rebuild the array, all we did was eject and replace the faulty drive. From there, it was a matter of three or four mouse clicks before the RAID 5 array was recovering itself in the background. Rebuilding a 4.5TB array takes a long time, so we were pleased that we could still use the volume normally during the process.

The Seagate BlackArmor 440 is a powerful NAS with a huge array of business-oriented features. In fact, it’s almost certainly overkill for home users, unless you have a large home network. After all, it’s eight times the price of the consumer-friendly MyBook World 1TB. But with its enormous capacity and wealth of features, it would make a very useful addition to a small office network.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB

Nathan Edwards — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:00:00 -0500

Introducing the first two-platter terabyte drive

It was a big month for storage. Not only did Western Digital bring to the market the first 2TB consumer hard drive, but Seagate came to the game with another milestone: a two-platter 1TB drive. Both offerings contain 500GB platters, the highest platter density yet achieved.

The Barracuda 7200.12 1TB is the first drive we’ve tested from the 12th generation of Seagate’s 7,200rpm Barracuda line, and it’s Seagate’s best chance for a fresh start following the firmware issues that plagued its 7200.11 line.

The 1TB 7200.12 has much in common with drives from the previous generation of Barracudas: It features 32MB of L2 cache, 7,200rpm rotational speeds, and SATA 3Gb/s data transfer with Native Command Queuing. The 7200.12, though, needs just two platters to achieve 1TB, whereas the 7200.11 used four.

The next-generation Seagate Barracuda is wicked-fast.

Generally, fewer platters mean higher areal density, which translates into better performance. For example, our previous favorite terabyte drive, the Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ, used three platters and outperformed the older Barracuda’s four platters. So surely a two-platter drive will be faster, right?

Yup. The new 1TB Barracuda’s read and write speeds approach those of the Western Digital Velociraptor. The Barracuda’s average sustained reads in our h2benchw benchmark exceeded 100MB/s, 7 percent faster than the Samsung’s, while sustained write speeds were an impressive 99.3MB/s, nearly 14 percent faster than the Samsung drive. Random access reads were more than 25 percent quicker on the Barracuda, burst speeds were 24MB/s faster, and the Barracuda’s PCMark Vantage score was more than 25 percent higher than the Samsung’s. In fact, only the Barracuda’s random-access write speeds failed to beat the Samsung’s—at 15.2ms, they’re still zippy, but no match for the Samsung’s 9.8ms response time.

The 1TB 7200.12 drive has a list price of $150 and a street price of about $120, which puts it in direct competition with its older, bigger cousin, the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11—which has retailed for around $140 consistently for months. The 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green fetches $300.

As appealing as the Caviar’s eco-friendly message may be, you can actually save money by buying two of the 7200.12 drives—and get better performance to boot.

Seagate Suffers Setback in SSD Development

Paul Lilly — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:22:43 -0500

Seagate, who originally planned to serve up enterprise SSD products in 2008 and later changed its target date to sometime in 2009, has suffered a setback in SSD development that may end up delaying the release until at least 2010, according to an investment bank briefing note.

"Notably in the last two weeks, we heard that Seagate (the company we think is closest in terms of market penetration) had another setback in its efforts to design an enterprise storage drive to compete with ZeusIOPS," wrote Kevin D. Vassily, an analyst at investment bank Pacific Crest Securities.

It remains unclear exactly what kind of setback Seagate is running into, but Vassily did bring up LSI in his note, the company Seagate picked to design and supply controller silicon for its SSDs. If Seagate is forced to find a new supplier, it might be mid-2011 or later before Seagate is able to ship SSDs in any volume, Vassily says.

Seagate Introduces New Members to its BlackArmor Family

Andy Salisbury — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:30:29 -0500

Earlier today Seagate announced several additions to its line of BlackArmor external hard drives.

The drives, which are aimed at small businesses, include the BlackArmor NAS 220 storage server, BlackArmor WS 110 external drive and the BlackArmor PS 110 portable drive. The NAS 220 will be able to hold up to 4TB of storage, and sports data protection for up to 20 PCs on a network. The WS 110, which is meant to be a desktop accessory, will come with USB 2.0 and eSATA connectors, and packs with up to 2TB worth of space. And, lastly, the PS 110 comes with up to 500GB of storage, and will feature with a standard USB 2.0 connector.

The NAS 220 will be available starting at $699.99 for the 4TB model starting in July, whereas the WS 110 and PS 110 are available now for $309.99 (2TB) and $159.99 (500GB), respectively.

Image Credit: Seagate