4 Platters = Terabyte Drive

Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 (Fig. 1) packs 1 Tbyte of data into 4 platters that fit into the standard 3.5-in hard drive space. Keep in mind that Seagate’s definition of 1 Tbyte is the 1000-based version of a billion bytes versus the more conventional 1024-based version — but that is still a lot of bytes. It employs Seagate’s second generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) to achieve this density. The 7200rpm drive handles the latest 3Gbit/s SATA interface. It supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a sustained data rate of 105 Mbytes/s. The unit comes with 32 Mbytes of cache. The unit is remarkably quiet, generating less than 2.7bels of noise when it is idle. It can handle a 2ms 63G shock while operating, and draws about 2.8A at 12VDC. The standard warranty is 5 years. Related Links Seagate