The basic characteristics of a few Seagate drives sketch out the state of the industry. Other drive makers, particularly Hitachi, offer similar products, but we've chosen one vendor to make price comparisons a bit more sensible. This year the disk industry will be making a lot of progress in 2.5 inch devices, offering sturdy drives that are aimed at the server market. Similar technology will also yield bigger disks for laptops and low end servers, plus some very capacious drives in the 3.5-inch class. Both Seagate and Hitachi will be shipping terabyte drives this year.
| BRAND | Seagate | Seagate | Seagate | Seagate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MODEL | Momentus 7200.1 | Cheetah 15K.5 | Savvio 15K | Barracuda 7200.10 |
| TYPE | Notebook | Server | Server | Desktop & Server |
| FORM FACTOR | 2.5 | 3.5 | 2.5 | 3.5 |
| INTERFACE | SATA | SCSI, FIBER | SAS | SATA, PATA |
| CAPACITY | 120 - 160 GB | 300 GB | 73 GB | 1,000 GB |
| RPM | 7200 | 15000 | 15000 | 7200 |
| AVG SEEK (MS) | 10.5 - 12.5 | 3.5 - 4.0 | 2.9 | 12.6 |
| AVG LATENCY (MS) | 4.2 | 2.1 | 2.1 | 4.2 |
| POWER | 2.6 W (active) | 13.1 W (active) | 8 W (active) 5.2 W (idle) |
12 -13 W (active) 9 W (idle) |
| HEAT (BTU/HR) | 8.9 (active) | 44.7 (active) | 27.3 (active) 19.8 (idle) |
42.7 (active) 30.7 (idle) |
| SINGLE UNIT PRICE | $120 | $800 | $400 | $385 |