Seagate puts SMR tech in super thin hard disk drive

Sep 2, 2015 07:28 GMT  ·  By

In a row of new product announcements, Seagate Technology has announced another series of HDDs, this time dedicated for laptops or just for fans of thin hard disk drives.

Coming in 2.5" form factor, the 2TB-sized hard drive comes with Seagate's brand-new SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) technology, packing 1TB of density per platter, comprising just two magnetic recording platters, hence the slim form factor.

The new HDDs also offer new high spatial efficiency mechanics, including new head, preamp, channel and other components, reducing this way the overall weight of the device to 89 grams. Interface-wise, the drive uses ATA interface, but spindle speed or cache capacity remains undisclosed by Seagate.

However, the main feature of the new 2-platters, 2TB hard disk drives is of course its SMR tech, that were usually found only on Seagate's top-end, enterprise HDDs that managed to reach even 8TB of storage space, while Western Digital working with the same shingled magnetic technology offered the 10TB Ha10 HDD, holding the record as the hard disk drive with the largest storage space currently available.

SMR gives HDDs an extra inch of competitiveness against SSDs

Seagate shows this way that its SMR technology still holds a lot of potential, since 1TB 2.5" platters could mean the possibility of holding an even higher capacity for its 3.5" platters, meaning, again, that the 10TB 3.5" HDD record can be broken any time now.

Seagate believes that HDDs are still the tool to go to when large volumes of data must be stored in desktop and notebook PCs, and affordability still remains a major advantage for the large capacity HDDs, compared to faster and more expensive SSDs. While SMR does allow HDDs to remain competitive in storage space sector, the read/write speeds are actually worse than non-SMR devices, this being a good reason why Seagate didn't choose to disclose any sort of spindle speed, or other performance specs.

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