Seagate accelerates SAS
Product Spotlight
Seagate has introduced its first near-line Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drive, the 1-terabyte Barracuda ES.2. Although the company doesn't guarantee as great a mean time between failure rating as its mission-critical SAS drives ' 1.2 million MTBFs compared to the mission-critical 1.6 million MTBFs ' the Barracuda doesn't come with the price premium either. It costs about the same as a 300G SAS mission-critical drive, or about 30 percent more than a 1T Serial Advanced Technology Attachment drive, said Henry Fabian, executive marketing director at Seagate.
It offers some advantages over standard Serial ATA drives, the company said, including faster read and write times. The Barracuda can write serial data to the disk at almost 115 megabits/ sec. Competing SATA drives achieve about 80 megabits/sec.
It also has more comprehensive error-correcting measures and can interface with as many as 16 hosts at once.