Seagate has started shipping a 2 terabyte enterprise-class drive
for multi-drive, nearline storage environments.
The 3.5-inch Constellation ES, launched Monday, features 6
Gb-per-second serial-attached SCSI, or SAS, data-transfer
technology. In targeting nearline storage, Seagate says it is going
after the "fastest growing segment in enterprise storage."
Nearline storage is a term used to describe an intermediate type of
data storage that falls between online storage, which provides
speedy access to data, and offline storage, which is used for
backups, archiving, and other long-term storage. Nearline storage
technology retrieves data from a tape library or other device and
makes it available online.
The new Seagate product is the fourth-generation Constellation ES
drive. The enterprise-class drives run at 7200 revolutions per
minute and are also available in capacities of 500 GB and 1 TB. The
drives support up to 76 TB per square foot and offer data-transfer
speeds of 6 Gb/s SAS or 3 Gb/s SATA.
"The Constellation ES drive tackles the concerns of shrinking IT
budgets, floor space constraints and energy consumption,
efficiently and cost-effectively," Carla Kennedy, VP of Seagate's
enterprise product line, said in a statement.
Seagate introduced its first enterprise solid-state drive last
December. The Pulsar, which is built for blade and general servers,
is the first of what the company says will be a line of enterprise
SSDs from the company.
The 2.5-inch drive has a SATA interface and is available with up to
200 GB of storage. It has a peak performance of up to 30,000 read
input/output operations per second and 25,000 write IOPS. The SSD
also has a read/write rate of 240 MB per second and 200 MB/s,
respectively. The device comes with a five-year warranty.