Seagate introduces 2 TB Constellation ES hard drives

160 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB drives launched by Seagate

Segate introduces the new 2 TB enterprise-class disk drive which includes the built-in spin features for power management.

The Constellation and Constellation ES series will replace the Seagate’s Barracuda ES enterprise drives. The Constellations are available in 160 GB and 500 GB with a 2.5 inch smaller form factor whereas the Constellation ES 3.5 inch series comes in 500 GB, 1Tb and now 2 Tb. Both these constellations comes in with Serial Attached SCSI 6Gbit/sec. or Serial ATA 3Gbit/sec. models and include a feature that allows them to shut down when not in use to save power.

The two Constellations come in 4 platters with a speed of 7200 rpm. They have 32Mb cache for SATA and 16 Mb cache for the SAS model. But the prices for these drives are not yet revealed.

“We see the world moving to SAS even in the nearline space,” says Barbara Craig, senior product marketing manager for Seagate’s enterprise compute group.

The Constellation drives will be available in the market by March and the Constellation ES drives will be available in the second half of the year. The self encrypting drive (SED) version may be released in July 2009.

With this product line, Seagate will also introduce a new power-efficiency feature called PowerChoice, which is a user- or OEM-controllable spin-down function.

PowerChoice has four levels:- With PowerChoice 1 the drive is fully “awake.” PowerChoice 2 “parks” the drive head away from the drive platter. PowerChoice 3 spins down the drive partially—in idle mode, Constellation drives on PowerChoice 3 draw 2.8 watts of power for SAS and 2.4 watts for SATA. PowerChoice 4 spins the drive down entirely.

As the drive capacities increase the data failures also increase and can cause serious damage. But according to John Rydning, research director, hard disk drives at IDC, to guard against failures, most disk systems now have RAID 6 capabilities to protect against a second drive failing while one drive is being rebuilt.

“What we call ‘capacity-optimized drives’ like these,” says Rydning, “are generally used first for second and third tiers of storage,” which are usually redundant.

Segate’s next target is Constellation drives at tier 2 that is one level below the 15000 rpm Fiber channel and SAS drives.  Seagate’s drives will reside in disk arrays and servers that sit between primary storage and tape archive systems.

John Monroe, a vice president of research at Gartner Inc., said that the need for larger space drives need will keep in increasing in all directions and dimensions but there also be scrutinizing of storage system purchases on the basis of low power consumption, footprint and cost per gigabytes.