Seagate Technology Inc continues its march towards magnetic disk storage capacities unimagined even five years ago, having triumphantly seen off all pretenders to its crown. This week it launched a 5.25 drive that finally lays to rest the manhole covers so beloved of fans of IBM Corp’s mainframe disk. Seagate’s 5.25 Elite 23 package stores a cool 23.4Gb. The best we’ve seen (from several vendors) for a 2.5 drive is 1.3Gb, but Seagate has now crashed that barrier with a 0.67 thick 2.5 drive that stores 2.5Gb. The Elite 23 ST423451 provides more than 2.5 times the capacity of the next largest drive available today – not surprisingly, since it needs 14 platters to get that capacity. The platters spin at 5,400rpm and it uses magneto-resistive heads and partial response-maximum likelihood technology, optimizing performance with Seagate’s Advanced SCSI Architecture II code. It comes with 8-bit or 16-bit UltraSCSI interface, for up to 40M- byte per second peak data transfer rate. Sustained formatted data transfer rate is between 8.2M-bytes and 12.1M-bytes per second. The drive has a 2Mb multi-segmented, adaptive cache for accelerated performance. Samples and volume are planned for the third quarter, but Seagate is coy about pricing. The new Marathon 2250, or ST92255AG, is the 2.25Gb 2.5 drive. The platters spin at 4,500rpm for a seek time of 14mS. For designers unable to accomodate 0.67, there is a 1.35Gb Marathon 1350sl or ST91350AG that is provides half an inch thick. Volume production is planned for next quarter; again, no prices.
