Look behind you, WD: Seagate's turned up, and it has 3 biz drives

Seagate is playing catch-up in the enterprise space with its announcement of two new 3.5-inch drives for 24x7 operations and a new 2.5-inch Savvio drive optimised for performance and power-efficiency. The 3.5-inchers are Constellation drives, positioned as an enterprise value drive, the Constellation CS, and an enterprise …

[Silverburn]

Theoretically, I can now max out my drobo at last. And my credit card at the same time.

[Richard Lloyd]

Wake me up when they go below 140 quid

4TB drives are massively overpriced compared to 3TB at the moment. The 3TB Seagate internal drives I have are now 100 quid and yet the cheapest 4TB internal drive anywhere is 185 quid - 85% more expensive for 33% more filestore. In other words, you'll have to wait 12-18 months before 4TB actually becomes the sweet spot that the 3TB currently is.

Also don't forget that 3TB drives have a little further to fall to get to pre-Thailand flood prices, so that sweet spot for 4TB might even be 2 years away.

[Geoff Campbell]

Re: Wake me up when they go below 140 quid

That's an inordinately long way of saying "Leading edge".

The highest capacity drives are always more expensive per GB than older models. And always will be. But the price drop, when it comes, will be swift and very pleasing.

GJC

[Anonymous Coward]

One year warranty? No thanks

Until Seagate reverts to a three year or five year warranty for all its disk drives, I'll buy other brands.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: One year warranty? No thanks

You get what you pay for... If you buy those crap consumer drives you deserve a 1 yr warranty.

No drive I buy has ever come with less than three years...

[Captain Scarlet]

Re: One year warranty? No thanks

Unless your doing a custom build pc you don't get a choice in hard drives, the same goes for external hard drives unless they speify the drive (Which the majority don't)

[Nigel 11]

Crap vendor

If you buy your PCs from a decent vendor in significant quantity (20+), you tell them what model of drive you want and they'll build them. Ditto motherboard, graphics card, anything else you want to plug in.

Oh ... the beancounters say it's got to be Dell. Find another employer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: One year warranty? No thanks

They can give whatever warranty they like, but the vendor has to provide a two year guarantee under European law, so it is up to them to sort out the extra year with the wholesaler/Seagate/whoever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: One year warranty? No thanks

Seagate - I won't even touch that brand any more.....

I buy Hitachi Ultrastar, and that is about it.

I am SO fucking sick and tired of shit drives and all the problems they cause.

It's mostly ALL the time and ALL the fucking around to get all the systems rebuilt with the same software, running the same way, with all the tweaks and knob twistings, that makes a brilliant PC that cracks time and space - and these take 2 or 3 weeks to get "built" or running basically right and another 3 or 4 months to get fine tuned.

Fucking Seagate Drives....

The discount drives ARE pieces of shit. The enterprise class drives - I don't think they really are that much better.

The price difference is one thing, but the cost in time and productivity and general sanity - they are not worth it.

I think the basic cheaper consumer drives, at the very least, must come with a very low defect rate to allow at least 3 years minimum operating time on say 90% of them...

Most of them are fucked within 12 months.

And the enterprise class, should be upped to 5 years, of 24/7 guaranteed defect free running time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Warranty

"Service & Support -5 years warranty" - The Seagate 'enterprise' drives come with 5 year warranty.