Yes, that headline is correct. No, you didn’t ” Quantum Leap ” back to the halcyon days of the first terabyte-capacity hard drives. Seagate is actually releasing 3.5″ magnetic hard drives for the enterprise market in 1TB and 2TB capacities , built for data centers with replicated servers and legacy solutions that require 512-byte sectors. The drives spin at 7,200 RPM and sport 6Gbps SATA interfaces, rather than the 12Gbps SAS interface commonly found on server drives. The drives employ conventional magnetic recording rather than the trickier and slower shingled magnetic recording.
The new drives aren’t going to light the world on fire with 194 MB/s maximum transfer rates or 4.16ms latency, but those specs are hardly the point. The key in the server arena is reliability in 24/7 continuous operation and the ability to withstand the vibration of being packed in an array of many drives.
