Seagate: Terabyte Platter HDDs Now in Volume Production
As part of its quarterly earnings call, Seagate said that it has begun putting 1 Terabyte per platter hard drives into production.
CEO Steve Luczo said that mass production has been delayed and "lagged" behind Seagate's initial plans, but is now on track to be shipped in a volume of "millions" of units by the end of the current quarter. The transition to the mass market will enable the company to take the technology into the mainstream while preserving more profit margin.
While Luczo said that Seagate has not been directly affected by the flooding in Thailand, it conceded that some of its suppliers were affected and that the company will be able to ship between "40 million and 50 million drives" during the December quarter. In the most recent quarter, Seagate shipped a total of 50.8 million hard drives - 6.9 million into the enterprise market, 33.4 million client consumer drives and 10.5 million non-compute hard drives. 67 percent of Seagate drives were distributed via OEMs, 10 percent via retail and 23 percent via distributors.
Seagate's total revenue was slightly up year-over-year to $2.8 billion, but the recorded net profit was down to $140 million.

I think a lot of us enthusiasts have gotten a little tired of having to stick with 1.0 & 1.5 TB HDDs simply due to concerns over failure rates on the 2.0 & 3.0 TB models... So while I think a lot of the headlines will focus on the introduction of 3.5" HDDs of 4.0-5.0 TB capacity, most of us will instead know that this means the 2.0 & 3.0 TB drives will no longer be subjected to the expected issues from being bleeding-edge.
How did Luczo turn into Seagate?
Yeah but with 1TB/platter drives, the platters are still bleeding-edge. Never expect a hard drive to last, just keep a backup so you don't have to worry about reliability. Buy the capacity you want with the speed you want and be done with it. And buy a backup drive
There were a few specific models, especially when 2+TB drive first came out, that were pretty terrible (especially Seagate which I love and was very disappointed with), but it was not a problem across the board, and definitely not a problem with most of the current drives available. the problem is not so much failure rate, as much as it is a question of what do you back up to? I have 2 very old 1TB drives (one is going on 7 years), and they are both full to the brim just waiting to fail and break my heart. So I am building a home server which will have RAID 1 or 10 which should give me the redundancy and speed that I need for the network. I just hope the drives last long enough and don't fail before I can afford the 4 drives I need for the server!
But that is the trick (and real expense) of large drives. It is not like some little 80Gig drive you can throw on a few DVDs. With files that large you have to back up to other large drives, which means buying a 2TB server equals buying 3 drives. 2 For RAID 1, plus a spare external that you occasionally image to, but stays unplugged most of the time as a fail safe. It sucks to loose a 20GB music collection, but it really burns to loose that plus all of the family photos, videos, the movie collection, software, and work projects. Always backup!
Only the HDD division.
Lol
Expect around 160-170MB/s sustained transfer rate at the outer edge of the platters.
Current drives like the Caviar Black 2TB do about 135MB/s on the outer edge.
This is interesting - it puts it nearly into the speeds of the second generation SSD. However, it will still have the problem of decreasing speeds as it is tested and it still as moving parts. Still if it is cheap, it will be a great mass storage option.
I have not read a lot of HDD reviews lately, I am surprised the Caviar black is that fast. My Samsung F3 hits 112 mb/s read and 108 mb/s write on ATTO. The F3 cost me $50 and so I doubt that Caviar Black is worth the increased cost of the WD drives. Interestingly, the F3 maintains its speed in the ATTO test fairly consistently.