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Seagate Launches 5 TB 2.5" HDDs and 2 TB SMR SSHDs

posted by martyb on Wednesday October 26 2016, @10:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the now-you-CAN-take-it-with-you? dept.

takyon writes:

Seagate has launched the world's first 5 TB 2.5" hard disk drives (HDDs). However, they won't fit in most laptops:

The new Seagate BarraCuda 2.5" drives resemble the company's Mobile HDDs introduced earlier this year and use a similar set of technologies: motors with 5400 RPM spindle speed, platters based on [shingled magnetic recording (SMR)] technology with over 1300 Gb/in2 areal density, and multi-tier caching. The 3 TB, 4 TB and 5 TB BarraCuda 2.5" HDDs that come with a 15 mm z-height are designed for external storage solutions because virtually no laptop can accommodate drives of that thickness. Meanwhile, the 7 mm z-height drives (500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB) are aimed at mainstream laptops and SFF desktops that need a lot of storage space.

Seagate has also launched a 2 TB shingled solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD) with 8 GB of NAND cache and a 128 MB DRAM cache buffer. The 1 TB and 500 GB versions also have 8 GB of NAND and 128 MB of DRAM. These are the first hybrid drives to use shingled magnetic recording.

Seagate press release (for "mobile warriors" only).

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:45PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:45PM (#419026) Journal
    It's not made sense to put spinning rust into a laptop for ages. Laptops are moved around a lot and using a gyroscope that has to have a blade held a few atoms above the surface seems a terrible idea. My current one is now three years old and has a 1TB SSD. It replaced one two years older with a 256GB SSD. The SSD in the older one had a fairly hefty price premium, the newer one was a fairly small fraction of the total. Spinning rust only survives at the very low end of the laptop market (and with the volumes of tablets, it's hard there - with 256GB of flash in a high-end tablet, the economies of scale are pushing the price down). The big problem for hard disks at the low end is that they come with a lot of fixed costs. SSD controllers are a tiny fraction of the total cost and you can scale the cost of an SSD down almost linearly with capacity. A hard drive half the capacity is only going to be half the cost until you get to the point where the mechanical parts are dominating the total cost.
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