Though chief rival Western Digital was the first to strike the 2TB mark, Seagate has gone a step further to kick out the market’s first drive built to the new SATA spec.

The spritely mechanical disk uses four 500MB platters and 64MB of cache to peg sustained transfer rates at up to 138MB/s. That’s no slouch for a mechanical drive, but it sits comfortably in the 600MB/s offered by SATA 6Gb/s.

The drive will be available in about a week for the surprisingly reasonable MSRP of $299.

It's $19.95 for Saturn's rings.

Western Digital announced yesterday the immediate launch of the world’s first and largest 2.5″ drive at a whopping 1TB.

LAKE FOREST, Calif. – July 27, 2009 – WD (NYSE: WDC) today announced two new mobile hard drives that reach new capacity extremes. The highlight is a one terabyte model – the industry’s highest-capacity 2.5-inch drive available. Industry-leading 333 GB-per-platter technology enables the new WD Scorpio® Blue™ SATA 2.5-inch hard drives to offer mobile storage device and notebook users an enormous 1 TB capacity. A 750 GB WD Scorpio Blue model also will be available.

WD Scorpio Blue 750 GB drives (model WD7500KEVT) are available now through select distributors and resellers; the 1 TB capacity (model WD10TEVT) is available now configured into My Passport Essential SE USB drives. The manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) for the WD Scorpio Blue 1 TB drive is $249.99 USD and for the 750 GB version it is $189.99 USD. WD Scorpio Blue hard drives are covered by a three-year limited warranty

Enterprise SSD maker WhipTail has recently announced the introduction of a 6TB SSD which sounds fabulous until you hear that it’s all jammed into a 2U enclosure. Talk about buzzkill.

SUMMIT, N.J. – July 8, 2009 – Today, WhipTail Technologies Inc., a provider of solidstate drive (SSD) tier 0 storage appliances, announced availability of its 6TB WhipTail^TMSSD appliance. Still manufactured as a 2 rack unit (2U), this makes WhipTail the highest-capacity SSD tier 0 appliance available to mid- to large-sized enterprises, with the smallest footprint.

OCZ Technology has announced an upgrade to their popular Vertex line of SSDs. The new Turbo-branded parts boost read speeds from 230-250MB/s to 240-270MB/s, while write speeds have jumped from 135-180MB/s to 145-210MB/s.

The performance boost is owed to a pair of improvements: New proprietary firmware for the flash transition layer enhances access times and a 14MHz boost for what is now 64MB of 180MHz onboard SDR cache improves throughput.

And now we break for an obligatory cut to the firm’s PR wire:

OCZ Vertex Turbo Series provides a cutting-edge design for enthusiasts looking to transform their desktops or laptops. Enabled by a proprietary firmware and 64MB of 180MHz DRAM cache, the Vertex Turbo Edition ramps up performance levels to new heights, while providing the snappy computing, longer battery life, and shorter boot-ups users have enjoyed from the original. The Vertex Turbo delivers best-in-class read and write speeds clocking in at up to 270MB/s read and 210MB/s write along with the lower power consumption and superior durability compared to conventional hard drives.

Seagate is delaying its enterprise SSD launch until 2010 as the firm has stubbed its toe developing controller tech. [via]

The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) group announced on Wednesday that it has finalized the third generation of the SATA standard now known as SATA 3.0.

In a joint release (PDF) from Portland, OR and Taipei, Taiwan, SATA-IO president Knut Grimsrud intimated the need for a faster disk interface. “The SATA Revision 3.0 specification doubles the maximum transfer speed enabled by technology, paving the way for a new generation of faster SATA products,” he said.

Aside from doubling the throughput of the SATA interface to 6.0Gbps (600MB/s), the new standard has brought Native Command Queuing (NCQ) up to version 2. NCQ 2.0 is expected to improve disk performance in streaming media operations by guaranteeing a certain fixed data rate that preempts other disk activity.

SATA 3.0 also offers a new low insertion force (LIF) connector for 1.8″ drives and has established the parameters for a low-profile adapter for 7mm optical drives that have begun appearing in ultra-thin notebooks.

The SATA group has outlined that products using the new standard shall be branded as “SATA 6Gb/s” as opposed to “SATA-III” or “SATA 3.0″ which will no doubt proliferate anyhow.

In an all-too-frequent security breach, researchers purchased a hard drive on Ebay that contained US military secrets. Included in the data were policies, blueprints, and test-launch procedures. The disk also included personal information about Lockheed employees, including social security numbers.

None of us here on Icrontic are harboring military secrets on our hard drives (well, probably not anyway), but what sort of precautions to do you take when disposing of hard drives at home and at the office? Personally, all my retired hard drives are in a shoebox; their platters will make a nice set of coasters before their cases and logic boards meet the rubbish bin one day. Reselling them on Ebay is definitely not in the cards, even for my mundane data.

LaCie introduces 1TB Rugged XL with lots of rubber involved.

Fresh and fabless storage startup SandForce is beginning to talk about its SF-1000 SSD controller which promises read/write parity of 250MB/s with 4k blocks. Anyone who’s savvy to SSD performance figures is immediately interested in what we’re about to write.

Run by former NVIDIA employees and backed by funding from at least two top-tier storage firms, the company already boasts an impressive patent portfolio that includes methods to drastically change SSD write performance. Chief amongst the list is a hardware compression/decompression mechanism which primarily permits for certain scenarios where writes can be performed without the typical (and slow) read-modify-write sequence.

The controller is coupled with a hardware compression/decompression engine. Compressed data is stored in a particular, primary region of the data storage device with any overflow data in a mapped overflow region. When read the decompressed data is stored in the host server’s DRAM with the DRAM location stored in a table along with the storage device address, the pair constituting a pointer linking the DRAM address to the storage device address.

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What do you do if you’re a manufacturer of mechanical hard disks for whom it would be a great deal of effort to shift gears into SSD production? Why you buy an SSD manufacturer, of course!

Western Digital has announced that it has acquired SiliconSystems Inc. in the pursuit of immediate solid state production. Here’s your boring press release:

LAKE FOREST, Calif. – Mar. 30, 2009 – Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC), a world leader in hard drive storage for computing and consumer electronics applications, today announced that it has completed a $65 million cash acquisition of SiliconSystems, Inc., Aliso Viejo, Calif., a leading supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market.

Since its inception in 2002, SiliconSystems has sold millions of SiliconDrive® products to meet the high performance, high reliability and multi-year product lifecycle demands of the network-communications, industrial, embedded-computing, medical, military and aerospace markets. These markets accounted for approximately one third of worldwide solid-state drive revenues in 2008. SiliconSystems’ product portfolio includes solid-state drives with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, CF and other form factors. SiliconSystems has developed extensive intellectual property to address the stringent embedded systems market requirements to ensure data integrity, eliminate unscheduled downtime, protect application data and software and provide for data security and protection through its patented and patent-pending PowerArmor®, SiSMART®, SolidStor® and SiSecure™ technologies.

Tentatively called SATA3, AMD and Seagate took time on Monday to demonstrate the first public iteration of the new SATA spec that offers transfer rates up to 600MB/s.

The new specification is in the final phase of development and should offer compliant drives by year’s end. On the platform front, AMD has pledged chipset support in a revision to their newest SB750 logic.

Like all other specifications in the ATA family, the entire SATA3 ecosystem will be backwards-compatible with SATA-150 and SATA-300 devices and controllers.

Developers, deve-- er, marketing, marketing, marketing!

Reality check: A faster bus speed is not going to make your miserably slow mechanical drive any faster. A solid-state disk is the ticket to ride on this superhighway.

Every geek’s favorite online store, Newegg, is running a smoking-hot deal on Hitachi 1TB hard drives. You can never have too much hard drive space, right? If you have been waiting to pull the trigger on a shiny new drive to hold your bible music legally-purchased iTunes movie collection, now might be the time. Click the jump to grab the deal.

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