Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Seagate kills 5400 rpm desktop drives, all Barracudas now 7200 rpm

Computerworld - Seagate today announced that it's bumping the platter rotation speed in all of its flagship Barracuda desktop hard drives from 5400 rpm to 7200 rpm.

The move to 7200 rpm across the board for Barracudas also means that Seagate is the first company to offer a 1TB of capacity at that drive rotation speed.

The move away from 5400 rpm drives is based on the advent of a new read/write head technology that has allowed Seagate to squeeze more data onto a drive platter and still be able to read it.

In another development, Seagate said it will be converting its line of Barracuda XT 3.5-in. hard drives to a hybrid drive technology by adding NAND flash to the drives as a type of inexpensive cache. The most frequently used data is kept on the NAND flash board to increase performance.

Seagate already sells hybrid drives under its Momentus XT line, which has up to 500GB capacity. The Barracuda XT lineup includes models that have as much as 3TB of capacity. Seagate would not specify a date for the launch of the new Barracuda XT hybrid drives, saying only that its disclosure of the new line is to demonstrate it is committed to hybrid technology.

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