Capacities are shooting up on 3.5 disk drives to the point where if you want less than about 1.5Gb, there is little need to consider 5.25 ones: Scotts Valley, California-based Seagate Technology Corp has extended its line of 3.5 fast SCSI drives with the ST11200N, which stores 1.2Gb unformatted. Evaluation units will be available in the third quarter with production quantities in the fourth. It uses the Imprimis Wren technology and includes the fast SCSI-2 interface that provides a 10Mbyte-per-second data transfer rate, write cacheing, multi-segmenting cacheing, tagged command queuing and asynchronous event notification. The drive also features sustainable input-output transfer rate of over 3Mbytes-per-second. As with the new generation of large capacity 3.5 disks, Seagate has accelerated rotation speed, though it doesn’t say to what, but as a result, the latency factor is only 6.7mS, with read and write seek times averaging 10.5mS and 12mS respectively, with a single track seek time of less than 2mS. The drive also includes spindle synchronisation for disk mirroring and array applications, and the mean time between failures is put at 22 years 10 months – does that take account of the greenhouse effect? It uses Seagate’s patented Zone Bit Recording to record more data on the drive’s outer tracks, which of course have more storage sectors, and enables fewer heads and platters to be used for a given capacity. The OEM evaluation pricing for the ST11200N is $1,900.
