The industry is a buzz over the impact of hard drive manufacturers transitioning to 4K sectors by January 2011 and it’s impact on users primarily hanging on to Windows XP.
The benefits of moving to 4K sectors:
Higher capacity with more usable disk space
Runway for continued hard drive capacity improvements
Improved data integrity with larger Error Correction (ECC) block sizes
The drawback: Windows XP is not designed to handle 4K sectors and creates drive partition that are not aligned to the 4K format. Furthermore, many popular HDD imaging utilities result in the same problem – unaligned drive partitions, even on Vista or Window 7. Check out a recentBBC articleon the subject. Customers wanting to stretch their IT dollar by upgrading Windows XP systems will have to rely on 4K emulation software built into the drive. Basically the drive is able to pretend it’s using 512K block sizes. This works great when hard drive partitions are aligned. But if you encounter and unaligned situation (XP or Utility created) your system could suffer a performance hit. Check out these results. Yikes!
The silver lining: yet another reason for a PC Refresh. As long as you format and partition with Windows Vista (SP 1 or older) or Windows 7, partition align is golden. If you or your customers commonly use other software for drive imaging or partitioning, check with your vendor to make sure it is compatible with 4K drives.
This is a huge evolution in hard drive technology. One that is 30 years in the waiting. Expect hard drive manufacturers like Seagate to spend a lot of time and energy around awareness and education on 4K sectors.
Is this the hard drive industry’s Y2.011K ?
Not likely, but it does make getting a new PC more inviting since I am one of those hangin’ on to Windows XP.
A hard drive is a hard drives is a hard drive… boring to look at, but oh so important to what we do whether it’s simple external storage, everyday computing, or high performance multimedia and gaming.
Seagate recently took a new approach to hard drive marketing, using iconic imagery and emotion to depict what Barracuda drive does what. I assume this is to better inform customers of what the key differences are between Barracuda LP, Barracuda, and Barracuda XT….visually.
Oh, and there’s that other thing about standing out in a crowd of hard drive images on online reseller sites and advertising.
I think they look pretty cool, and I expect to see more of the same for Seagate’s other drives in the enterprise and notebook segments. For now, Barracuda gives you a taste of what’s to come. You can’t fault Seagate for having a little fun with the products they have been designing, manufacturing, marketing, and selling for 30 years.
“We like the transfer speed the Barracuda XT provides, we like the huge 2TB storage it offers. We love the 64MB cache it has. For all intents and purposes the Barracuda XT is just as Seagate advertised it.”
What’s not to love?
Another thing they liked about the Barracuda XT was its first-ever 6Gb/s SATA interface - also known as SATA 3 as it is the 3rd generation of the SATA interface standard. 6Gb/s SATA is a big deal. The Barracuda XT gains some speed today because of it, but once systems are built to take full advantage of this new standard, watch out!
Seagate is proud to be a technology leader with 6Gb/s SATA. Thanks for noticing Bjorn3d!
Why? It was the fastest drive tested, and a great value for well under $100.
Among other things, the Barracuda copied a 7 GB Crysis game folder 28 seconds faster than a 1 TB drive from another drive maker.
Seagate was able to achieve this by cramming 500GB on each platter in this 2-platter drive. That’s the best areal density available anywhere. Quite the feat!
Makes me wonder what AlienBabel will think of the new lightning-fast Barracuda XT drive with the same areal density, up to 2TB capacity and up to 64MB cache.
Microsoft may have a hit on their hands with Windows 7. If you still need convincing, here’s one more reason: Seagate disk drives go faster on Windows 7.
Seagate internal tests have shown a dramatic performance improvement for Windows 7 based PCs using Windows 7 compatible Seagate disk drives.
Why do systems with Seagate drives zoom with Windows 7?
Windows 7 is more efficient with storage resources. Using less for system boot & general OS functions leaves more for applications.
Windows 7 is more efficent with cache. That means PCs that use hard drives with larger caches (like the Barracuda XT’s 64MB cache) will run faster.
Good news: Seagate has a whole slew of Microsoft Windows 7 compatible hard drives today, many with 32MB and 64MB caches.
If you’re going to pull the trigger on Windows 7, make sure your hard drive is ready to rock too.
There’s lots of buzz out there on this drive today – check it out here and here and here.
Barracuda XT is the first drive to sport the SATA 3.0 interface that runs at up to 6 Gb/s. The combination of this 2X faster interface, the Barracuda XT’s 64 MB cache and a SATA 6Gb/s motherboard and you are off to the races!
The drive is best suited for video editing, multi-media publishing and PC gaming applications.
Big, fast and reliable. Now there’s a high-speed Barracuda alternative that goes above and beyond the mainstream Barracuda 7200 drive for situations where screaming speed and high capacity are on the wish list.
Computer Shopper had this to say and more about the Seagate BlackArmor WS110 drive. It’s one of the few backup drives designed for business use. Secure, simple, compact - and it looks good too.
Also unique is the way it shares software with the rest of the BlackArmor storage line.
We’ve had a lot of requests for more real-world insight on how to pick a drive. There are so many choices today – how does one know which drive to use for which application?
We’ve responded with a new video series called The Two-Minute Drill. These videos each feature a Seagate product expert and focus on how to select a disk drive for a particular topic – all in less than two minutes. For example, here’s Joni Clark explaining what a 7200 rpm drive does for a notebook PC.
You can see the library of videos by viewing any one on the product pages of seagate.com – for example, this video of Ian Williams explaining SAS on the Savvio page.
Take look, and let us know what you think.
What storage topic would you like us to cover next?
The industry is a buzz over the impact of hard drive manufacturers transitioning to 4K sectors by January 2011 and it’s impact on users primarily hanging on to Windows XP.
A hard drive is a hard drives is a hard drive… boring to look at, but oh so important to what we do whether it’s simple external storage, everyday computing, or high performance multimedia and gaming.
Bjorn3D
AlienBabelTech.com conducted 
Seagate just announced the 
Computer Shopper 
Ars Technica