Seagate Ships Hard Drive With 40GB Per Disc

Seagate Technology today announced today it is shipping its newest U Series disc drive, the first offering up to 80 Gbytes on just two platters and, what Seagate claims is a record-breaking area density of 32.6 Gbits per square inch.

The new U Series spins up faster than ever, improving time-to-ready by 35 percent over previous generations to improve PC boot-up time. It features faster internal transfer rates of up to 54.5 Mbytes per second, an 8.9-msec seek time, the largest cache in its class at 2 Mbytes, and the Ultra ATA/100 interface for external burst transfer rates up to 100 Mbytes per second. With Seagate’s exclusive 3D Defense System(TM) and “sound barrier technology” (SBT), U Series offers the best combination of ruggedness, performance and quiet operation for mainstream PC and CE applications.

According to Seagate, this generation of U Series also offers a disc drive created specifically for Consumer Electronics (CE). U Series CE, now shipping to CE OEMs, utilizes fluid dynamic bearing (FDB) motors to achieve idle acoustics of 27 decibels, the lowest in the industry. Combined with best-in-class robustness and performance characteristics, U Series CE’s acoustics performance makes it the ideal drive for any acoustically-sensitive application.