SEAGATE®
INTRODUCES CONSTELLATION™: ALL-STAR ENTERPRISE
HARD DRIVES WITH THE WORLD’S HIGHEST CAPACITY
AND POWER EFFICIENCY
The Constellation family includes
2.5-inch nearline hard drive with lowest
enterprise power consumption and
record-setting 3.5-inch 7200-rpm 2TB hard
drive for nearline Tier 2 enterprise
applications
SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. — February 2, 2009 —
Seagate (NASDAQ:STX) today introduced its
Constellation™ family of new enterprise storage
solutions for Tier 2 nearline storage
applications. The two new drive models, the
2.5-inch Constellation and the 3.5-inch
Constellation ES hard drives, include a
combination of features that enable high
capacities, increased power efficiency,
enterprise-class reliability, and data security.
Both drives also include PowerChoice™ from
Seagate, which decreases power consumption by up
to 54% for record power savings in enterprise
environments.
“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.”
Constellation
The Constellation 2.5-inch hard drive is offered
in capacities of 160GB and 500GB with both 3
Gbps SATA and new SAS 2.0 interface running at
6Gb/s speeds. As the first SAS 2.0 nearline
drive, the Constellation hard drive enables
larger external storage topologies, 100% faster
data throughput and higher signal strength over
greater distances – dramatically increasing
storage scalability. The Constellation family
will begin shipping this quarter.
“Dell recognizes that increased capacity and
high-reliability are key to enabling further
adoption of small form factor storage within the
enterprise. With new capacities, small form
factor drives afford customers performance and
power gains within the same rack space,” said
Praveen Asthana, director of Dell Storage.
“As an industry-leader in storage, Dell is
pleased to partner with Seagate and be one of
the first companies to offer the Constellation
family of drives to our customers.”
Constellation ES
The 3.5-inch Constellation ES hard drive will be
available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities, and
with an enterprise-class SAS interface as well
as a SATA version, and provides best-in-class
capacity and performance. As the world’s only
7200-rpm 3.5-inch hard drive providing up to 2TB
of storage, the record-setting capacity of
Constellation ES hard drives are ideal for
3.5-inch based external storage architectures.
With Constellation ES hard drives, customers
don’t have to sacrifice performance in order to
gain the highest capacities. The Constellation
ES hard drive will ship in calendar Q3.
“Xyratex continues to work closely with
Seagate to advance storage system innovation to
meet both the performance and capacity-based
market requirements,” said Todd Gresham,
executive vice president and general manager of
the Networked Storage Solutions Division for
Xyratex. The new Constellation family of
products compliments Xyratex’s philosophy of
delivering cost-effective enterprise-class,
energy efficient storage solutions that help
provide our customers the long-term investment
protection they demand.”
With Seagate’s innovative PowerChoice
technology, both Constellation hard drive models
deliver the highest power-reduction savings ever
offered in an enterprise-class HDD, and provide
flexible, user-manageable options to deliver
power savings without sacrificing performance,
data integrity, or reliability. In addition, the
Constellation family of drives are backed with
field-proven, enterprise-grade reliability and
rated at a full 1.2 million hours MTBF.
Delivering on Seagate’s commitment to add
security features throughout its product
portfolio, the Constellation family of drives
are offered with optional self-encrypting drive
(SED) technology and provide government-grade
data security through the drive’s life cycle.
SED technology makes drive retirement and
disposal easy by eliminating the need for the
numerous manual processes involved which are
often incomplete, complex, expensive, or prone
to error. For critical information that must
remain secure, and because all systems are
eventually retired, whether being relocated,
re-purposed, or disposed of, the information on
a Constellation SED hard drive remains AES-safe.
Seagate Unified Storage™ architecture
delivers long-term business sustainability
Historically, the variety of drive interfaces,
form factors and now, security solutions, can
add complexity and increase costs for both IT
professionals and OEMs. Making the wrong choice
today creates storage
islands in the data center with no easy path for
upgrades – further complicating an already
complex environment. The Seagate Unified Storage
architecture converges best-of-breed
technologies (Serial
Attached SCSI, Small Form Factor and
Self-Encrypting Drives) into a foundation for
powerful yet simple storage that boosts business
and operational efficiency while reducing cost
and complexity.
The Seagate Unified Storage architecture
delivers a storage foundation for companies that
are proactively ensuring the long-term
sustainability of their business through
best-in-class IT practices. Companies will avoid
the risk of impacting their own product quality,
competitiveness, or profitability when their
storage system infrastructure and data center
footprint is optimized across power, cooling and
performance density. Because the role of small
form factor drives are important to the
long-term efficiency and sustainability of any
data center enterprise, Seagate will be
extending this component into all tiers of its
Unified Storage architecture in the future.
“With tightening IT budgets, Seagate is
committed to delivering enterprise-class
nearline storage solutions that ensure business
sustainability by optimizing resources, reducing
environment, energy or social impact and
satisfying customer requirements without
compromising performance,” said Sherman Black,
senior vice president, Seagate Core Marketing
and Strategy. “These new Constellation HDDs
provide business continuity in the data center
by offering the highest capacities, the lowest
power, and the latest in enterprise-class data
integrity with SAS 2.0 and AES government-grade
encryption.”
For more information about the Constellation
family of drives, in addition to Seagate’s other
enterprise storage solutions, visit
www.seagate.com.
About Seagate
Seagate is the worldwide leader in the design,
manufacture and marketing of hard disk drives
and storage solutions, providing products for a
wide-range of applications, including
Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile Computing, Consumer
Electronics and Branded Solutions. Seagate’s
business model leverages technology leadership
and world-class manufacturing to deliver
industry-leading innovation and quality to its
global customers, with the goal of being the
time-to-market leader in all markets in which it
participates. The company is committed to
providing award-winning products, customer
support and reliability to meet the world’s
growing demand for information storage. Seagate
can be found around the globe and at http://www.seagate.com.
Seagate, Seagate Technology
and the Wave logo are registered trademarks of
Seagate Technology LLC in the United States
and/or other countries. Constellation,
PowerChoice and Unified Storage are either
trademarks or registered trademarks of Seagate
Technology LLC or one of its affiliated
companies in the United States and/or other
countries. All other trademarks or registered
trademarks are the property of their respective
owners. When referring to hard drive capacity,
one gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes
and one terabyte, or TB, equals one trillion
bytes. Your computer’s operating system may use
a different standard of measurement and report a
lower capacity. In addition, some of the listed
capacity is used for formatting and other
functions, and thus will not be available for
data storage. Seagate reserves the right to
change, without notice, product offerings or
specifications.
# # #
PRESS RELEASE
February 3, 2009
WD® LAUNCHES INDUSTRY'S FIRST
2 TB HARD DRIVES WD's Eco-friendly, Cool and
Quiet, WD Caviar® Green™ Drive Marks the
Largest Capacity Hard Drive in the Industry
LAKE FOREST, Calif. - Jan. 27, 2009 - WD
(NYSE: WDC) today announced the first 2
terabyte (TB) hard drive - the world's
highest capacity drive and the latest
addition to WD's popular, environmentally
friendly, cool and quiet, WD® Caviar® Green™
hard drive family. This new 3.5-inch
platform is based on WD's industry-leading
500 GB/platter technology (with 400 Gb/in2
areal density) with 32 MB cache, producing
drives with capacities of up to 2 TB.
"While some in the industry wondered if
the end consumer would buy a 1 TB drive,
already some 10 percent of 3.5-inch hard
drive sales are at the 1 TB level or higher,
serving demand from video applications and
expanding consumer media libraries," said
Mark Geenen, President of Trend Focus. "The
2 TB hard drives will continue to satisfy
end user's insatiable desire to store more
data on ever larger hard drives."
WD Caviar Green is one of the most
successful product lines in the company's
recent history with its third-generation
GreenPower™ technology, now providing 2 TB
of proven reliable storage for today's
high-resolution files and graphics. WD
Caviar Green drives are designed for use in
USB/FireWire®/eSATA external hard drives,
desktop computers, workstations, and desktop
RAID environments.
"Saving power without sacrificing storage
capacity is what consumers want, and what
many businesses are requiring today. With
the launch of the new WD Caviar Green 2 TB
hard drive, customers receive the additional
capacities needed to operate today's highly
advanced programs and high-resolution
digital files while using less power than
typical drives with similar performance and
capacities," said Jim Morris, WD senior vice
president and general manager of client
systems.
Rock Solid Mechanical Architecture, Cool,
Quiet Hard Drives A number of advanced
technologies enable the speed, capacity and
performance of WD's Caviar Green 1.5 TB and
2 TB hard drives. Those include: StableTrac™,
which secures the motor shaft at both ends
to reduce system-induced vibration and
stabilize platters for accurate tracking
during read and write operations1;
IntelliPower™, which fine-tunes the balance
of spin speed, transfer rate and caching
algorithms designed to deliver both
significant power savings and solid
performance; IntelliSeek™, which calculates
optimum seek speeds to lower power
consumption, noise, and vibration; and
NoTouch™ ramp load technology, which is
designed to ensure the recording head never
touches the disk media resulting in
significantly less wear to the recording
head and media, as well as better drive
protection while in transit.
Availability and Pricing The WD Caviar
Green 2 TB is available at select resellers
and distributors. MSRP for the WD Caviar
Green 2 TB hard drives (model WD20EADS) is
$299.00 USD. More information about WD
Caviar Green desktop drives may be found on
the company's Web site at
http://wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=576
About WD WD, one of the storage
industry's pioneers and long-time leaders,
provides products and services for people
and organizations that collect, manage and
use digital information. The company
produces reliable, high-performance hard
drives that keep users' data accessible and
secure from loss. WD applies its storage
expertise to consumer products for external,
portable and shared storage applications. WD
was founded in 1970. The company's storage
products are marketed to leading systems
manufacturers, selected resellers and
retailers under the Western Digital® and WD
brand names. Visit the Investor section of
the company's Web site (www.westerndigital.com)
to access a variety of financial and
investor information.
1 The StableTrac feature is only included
on the 2 TB model.
###
Western Digital, WD, the
WD logo and WD Caviar are registered
trademarks of Western Digital Technologies,
Inc. in the US and other countries; Green,
IntelliPower, IntelliSeek, NoTouch,
StableTrac, and GreenPower are trademarks of
Western Digital Technologies, Inc. All other
trademarks herein are property of their
respective owner. As used for storage
capacity, one megabyte (MB) = one million
bytes, one gigabyte (GB) = one billion
bytes, and one terabyte (TB) = one trillion
bytes. Total accessible capacity varies
depending on operating environment. As used
for buffer or cache, one megabyte (MB) =
1,048,576 bytes.
The 2008 version of the High-Def Home
Theater server is in progress now.
Expect a 4U, 16TB or bigger, power-efficient
system, running on WinXP 32 with SageTV!
I
had to drop T-Mobile in favor of Verizon.
EV-DO speeds are around 550kbps down,
110kbps up. Not bad, just like 2001
DSL speeds! The phones they have kinda
suck compared to WM6.0 units I'd rather use,
so I opted for the LG Voyager.
We're looking at an eeePC vs ultraportable
article within the summer, hopefully.
I like the eeePC with the 8.9" LCD, and
compare that against a Penryn-based
dual-core 12.1" notebook or smaller.