With the rise of SSDs, hard drive manufacturers have turned to cost per GB and raw capacity as ways to compete. However, there still remains a demand for lower capacity drives where only moderate amounts of storage are required. This is true even in the enterprise market, something Seagate is proving with their new 1 TB and 2 TB Enterprise Capacity HDDs.
These Enterprise Capacity drives appear to be run of the mill drives using standard technologies but with improved reliability and performance. The drives use PMR platters spinning at 7200 RPM and feature a native 512-byte block size. The cache is the standard enterprise size at 128MB which is double the consumer variants which are usually 64MB for the same capacity. Performance comes in at 194 MB/s max sustainable transfer rate with a 24/7 operation rating.
It appears that there are still enough customers to keep a low capacity enterprise HDD market going for now. There is no word yet on pricing but I expect it to come in somewhere about 2-3x the consumer models. The warranty term is set at an extended 5 years with a 550 TB/year TBW endurance rating and an MTBF rating of two million hours.
