14 DAY TRIAL // Seagate has just announced its latest-generation Constellation family of hard disk drives, including a 2.5-inch lineup, offering the lowest enterprise power consumption and the company's first 2TB hard drive, part of the 3.5-inch lineup. The two solutions have been designed to provide users with high capacity, increased power efficiency, enterprise-class reliability in both 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch form factors. In addition, the company also announced that the new drives would include PowerChoice, a technology that is said to reduce the power consumption by up to 54%.
“The need for greater storage capacity will continue to expand in multiple directions and dimensions, but there will be an increasing scrutiny of all storage system purchases, with an eye to decreasing power consumption, footprint, and cost per GB in unprecedented ways,” said John Monroe, a research vice president at Gartner. “Performance will not be ignored, but a flexible balance of capacity, cost per GB, power and speed will become more crucial in fulfilling end-user storage demands at varied price points.”
As far as specifications go, the new 2.5-inch drives from Seagate's Constellation family, are offered in capacities of 160GB and 500GB, with both 3 Gbps SATA and SAS 2.0 interface, running at speeds of 6GB/s. This offers the storage solution for both server and portable computer markets, delivering a 100 percent faster data throughput. The Constellation ES, will be available as 3.5-inch drives with capacities of 500GB, 1TB and 2TB, also featuring support for both SATA II and SAS interfaces.
Seagate is yet to announce the pricing and availability details of its new 2.5-inch Constellation and 3.5-inch Constellation ES hard drives. With the announcement, the company becomes the second HDD vendor to introduce a massive 2TB hard drive solution, which will likely be used for various external storage devices or servers.