jmke

This statement by the famous Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, and zoologist Aristotle expresses our beliefs about the technological capabilities of Seagate. Seagate has been at the forefront of storage design, manufacturing, and service capabilities while attaining the status of the world's largest supplier of hard disk drives with their acquisition of Maxtor a few months ago.

Seagate recently announced the Barracuda 7200.10 as the successor to their Barracuda 7200.9 series with much surprise as the 7200.9 product line has only been available for a short period of time. Although the Barracuda 7200.10 series will become the flagship product for personal desktop solutions, the 7200.9 series will continue to be offered in capacities under 200GB as a "value performance" product once the 7200.10 drives are shipping in volume later this spring. As with previous Barracuda product group updates, the naming succession follows the standard point upgrade path but this change is anything but a simple number revision. The new Barracuda 7200.10 product will be the first desktop centric hard drive to feature perpendicular recording.

For nearly fifty years, the storage industry has been on a path where the longitudinal technology currently utilized would eventually become a limiting factor in drive capacities. Over the last decade the drive manufacturers have been doubling and at times quadrupling storage capacity at a dizzying rate in order to meet continuing demands from users. The standard method of increasing the amount of capacity in a drive is to either add more platters or increase the density of the data on each platter. Increasing the density of data that can be stored on a platter is the preferred manner, as it will allow for an overall increase in drive storage along with resulting performance and cost advantages by reducing the number of components. However, this solution requires significantly more effort from a research and development viewpoint that can lead to additional complexity and cost. While the storage manufacturers have been able to develop and implement some incredible technologies to achieve the capacities, cost, and drive performance we currently experience there is a limit to what can be achieved with today's technology.

__________________