Seagate Begins to Ship 2.5-Inch, 7mm Thick 2 TB Mobile Hard Drives with SMR
 

Seagate has started to ship its highest-capacity hard drives for notebooks. The new HDDs use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology with very high areal density as well as slimmed-down mechanics.

The new Seagate Mobile HDD 2 TB is the first hard drive to market in a 2.5-inch/7 mm form-factor with such extreme capacity. The hard drive is based on two 1 TB SMR platters running at 5400 RPM and features 128 MB of cache as well as SATA interface. The maximum sustainable transfer rate of the HDD is 100 MB/s, which is considerably lower than that of mainstream mobile hard drives (145 – 169 MB/s for Seagate’s own laptop HDDs). Seagate declares 13 ms average seek time for the hard drives. The new HDD weighs 3.17 oz (or 90 grams) and is aimed primarily at mobile computers or bulk cold storage, where you can arguably fit eight drives into a single 5.25-inch bay. Supermicro has an 88-bay 4U rack unit where each drive is hotswappable, though that fits a large PC in the rear; if hot-swappable isn't required, we could be looking at nearly 200+ per storage 4U rack with appropriate backplanes.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10042/...h-2-tb-hdd-smr