Scotts Valley (CA) - Seagate today announced that it has begun shipping nearline SATA drives that are designed to fill the gap between online and offline enterprise storage. The company claims that the new NL35 are more reliable than desktop drives, while offering a lower-priced enterprise storage solution for applications such as disc-to-disc backup, archive, and tiered storage.
Nearline is an emerging storage segment that so far has not received much media attention but is quickly gaining interest especially from IT managers. These drives are designed to bridge a growing gap in price and performance between online and traditional archive storage products. While similar to a the architecture of a common desktop drive, nearline devices such as the NL35 come with a higher life expectancy, better manageability as well as improved capability for integration in tiered storage environments.
According to Seagate, the additional features include workload management, error recovery control, one-step microcode download, and write-same technology. The reliability is rated at one million hour MTBF (mean time between failure) rating. Equipped with a SATA interface, the NL35 can be integrated in SAS-based infrastructure, with potentially hundreds of drives within a single SAS domain. Performance enhancements compared to desktop drives include 16 MByte of cache. Native Command Queuing is standard on Seagate's nearline drives.
