back to article Seagate drops new summer spinners, bares 'quiet', 'fast' models

Seagate is slinging two new spinners our way just in time for summer: a large one and a small one. The larger model is another variation on Seagate's 3.5-in 4TB technology: the Terascale. This is a 4-platter drive with 625Gbit/in2 areal density, spinning at 5,900 rpm, a 6Gbit/s SATA interface, 64MB cache, and a 160MB/sec …

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  1. BristolBachelor Gold badge

    WD 5900rpm

    "Neither WD, nor its subsidiary HGST, nor Toshiba, have 4TB drives spinning in the 5.900rpm area in their product ranges."
    Isn't there a 4TB WD Red? Those crawl in the 5900rpm range as I can attest. Am currently swapping a NAS to use them and the re-build time is horrific. Intellispeed really means "Stoopidslow" :(

    1. Chris Mellor 1

      Re: WD 5900rpm

      I have WD's 4TB Red drive going at 5400-5900 with Intellipower so I didn't class them as a true 5900rpm drive.

      Chris.

      1. BristolBachelor Gold badge

        Re: WD 5900rpm

        A WD "expert" on the Red desk told me that "intellipower" means that the speed of the drives is "between 5k and 7k", however, the ones I've got are always at the same speed - you can tell by the pitch that they sing as. They never seem to speed up or slow down. The expert also linked a page saying that intellipower drives were very fast because they had cache memory. Who knows what we would do without all these innovations from WD :-/

        I suspect that the speed range just allows them to ship a whole load of different drives without having to update the specs. Also bare in mind that the Reds are basically Greens but with firmware that supports the drive not dripping it's SATA connection when it reads a bad sector. I'm just a bit pissed that at the time I couldn't buy any of the Hitatchi or Samsung 7k drives, and the only proper 7k NAS drives I could get from WD were SAS only and cost almost the same per disk as the NAS chassis.

  2. Jim O'Reilly
    Holmes

    Smart RAID?

    If drives mainly fail through a head no longer working, or a limited bad patch on one disk, this idea makes a huge amount of sense. I suspect there is prior art on this though, so Seagate probably only has a short-term lock and no patent. This needs RAID controller code to work properly. too.

    1. Tom Maddox Silver badge
      Holmes

      Re: Smart RAID?

      I believe that Seagate do have a patent on this technology, in fact, based on my discussions with a former subsidiary of theirs which makes a product that uses a version of it. I could be wrong, though.

  3. N13L5

    Is this article just the result of being sloppy or is it a blatant shill?

    "Neither WD, nor its subsidiary HGST, nor Toshiba, have 4TB drives spinning in the 5.900rpm area in their product ranges."

    HGST's has the 5K4000 model, which has better specs than Seagate's drive...

    I have one here, it spins at 5,900 rpm and has 600,000 load cycles and 24/7 rating.

    1. Chris Mellor 1

      Re: Is this article just the result of being sloppy or is it a blatant shill?

      No shilling here. My info is that WD Reds have 5400-5900 rpm through Intellipower and so aren't true 5900rpm drives. Are you saying yours is 5,900rpm constantly? In which case my files are wrong :-)

      1. N13L5

        Re: Is this article just the result of being sloppy or is it a blatant shill?

        I'm not talking about WD Red!

        HGST Deskstar 5K4000 is still branded as a Hitachi drive, even though WD owns them, they operate as an 'independent' unit.

  4. Alex Future

    Disk fly boss walk spin nitty-gritty...

    ....but are we listening to the boy from the big bad city?

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