Seagate launches 2TB Constellation drives

PLAYING CATCH-UP with its main rival Western Digital Seagate has announced an identical twin sister to its rival's offer.

Dubbed the Seagate Constellation, the drive will bear a maximum of 2TB capacity while the company tries to match WD feature-for-feature, power consumption and all-round green goodness.

The drives will ship in two form factors, 2.5- and 3.5-inch with the smaller ones bearing 160GB and 500GB capacities, while the 3.5-inch ones will spin at 7.2K RPM and have 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. Seagate has opted to call the bigger ones ES-class drives. There will be a SAS 2.0 variant on these drives that will shorely please the server lot. MTBF on the drives is rated at 1.2 million hours and they also feature Self-encryption (SED).

More interesting is the fact that the 3.5-inch versions, including the 2TB unit will only see the light of day in Q3 (the 2.5-inchers are out this quarter).

So Seagate, possibly in an attempt to whitewash the whole Moose debacle (Moose being the internal name for the family of drives that were bricking left right and centre), is announcing the drives six months ahead of their actual launch date. Hence the lack of piccies and pricing. µ