Seagate's big-boy 750GB HDD

[Bob Crabtree]

Fancy a seriously BIG hard disk that can hold all your movies, stills and MP3s and still have room to back up your C: drive a few times over? Well, Seagate's got one - 750GB (unformatted) - and you can get the SATA2 variant right now for a VAT-inclusive £285-and-a-bit if you know where to look.

Find out more about Seagate's big-boy HDD in the HEXUS.headline and let us know your thoughts on perpendicular recording, Seagate and wopping great drives.

[ExceededGoku]

Man I really want one of these, but its far to expensive...

[Bob Crabtree]

Today, perhaps. Tomorrow, maybe, too. But very soon - much cheaper, if past HDD pricing is any guide.

Bob

[Robert]

What's the real size of it? Would it come to 732gb? Altho that doesn't seem enough...hmm.

Edit: Will SATA2 work with SATA1?

[pak000]

great technology but its still early - I'm going to wait to let them iron out any kinks and for the price to come down a bit

[mike_w]

What's the real size of it? Would it come to 732gb? Altho that doesn't seem enough...hmm.

Edit: Will SATA2 work with SATA1?

Real size is, presumably, 750GB, which is, I think, 698.49 Gibibytes.

[Kebab]

"use of magnetic material that accepts a charge perpendicular to the suface of disk platters, rather than at right angles"

Er surely that is the same thing? My english might fail me here but perpendicular to the surface of the disk is the same as right angle to the surface of the disk no?

[Bob Crabtree]

Various replies

The capacity - well, when you start off with a HDD maker saying 750GB, you've got to realise, first that it means unformatted and then it also doesn't mean what most poeple mean - ie 750x1024MByte

Instead, everywhere you or either think 1024, they think 1000.

Consequently, as I recall, you'll find, it's necessary to take the quoted figure and multiply it by 1000/1024 then do that to the resultant figure and do it to that result as well.

Alternatively, you could just cheat and multiply the quoted figure by 0.93 - each method, by my reckoning, delivers an unformatted capacity of about 697GB - in my real gigabytes.

Then, you've got to take account of what gets taken up by formatting - and I know no rules (or even rule of thumb) that might tell me what that might be - but don't believe it would or could be more than a gig or so.

So, I'd expect a 750GB drive to actually be able to hold, nominally, about 695GB.

As for whether a SATA2 drive (which we should probably call a SATA/300) will work on SATA1, I don't know whether all will but I'm sure that this one will - though I can't find anything on Segate's rather shabby online support pages that confirm this absolutely.

Bob

[Bob Crabtree]

"use of magnetic material that accepts a charge perpendicular to the suface of disk platters, rather than at right angles"

Er surely that is the same thing? My english might fail me here but perpendicular to the surface of the disk is the same as right angle to the surface of the disk no?

Of course it does! Sorry, I'm cream-crackered.

What I meant to say was "rather than parallel with it".

Solly!

I've changed it now.

Bob

[[GSV]Trig]

750Gb nice, wonder if theres room in my case for one, along side the 120Gb, 2x 80Gb's and the 3x 300Gb's

[Funkstar]

with a 750 and 3x 300 i'd be quite happy to drop the two 80s out of a case if it was mine

thankfully these drives will push down the price of the 500s. I've also read that the upper cieling for capacity using perpendicular storage is about 2TB. now that would be sweet

[kempez]

I see the point for server use and MAJOR power users but to me that type of storage is waaaay too vast

However I wouldn't mind getting my hands on one

[ExceededGoku]

I think I'd jsut get 2...

[[GSV]Trig]

with a 750 and 3x 300 i'd be quite happy to drop the two 80s out of a case if it was mine

The 2x80's are my RAID 0 for my OS tho...

[Funkstar]

ahhh, fairy nuff

[Mike Fishcake]

I've been looking at compatibility with SATA150 and SATA300, and with the HD manufacturers I've looked at (Western Digital, Seagate and Hitachi - probably the others too) a lot of SATA150 motherboards will just run it at 150, but for the ones that can't detect it, there is a jumper on the SATA300 HDD to clip it down to SATA150 compatibility mode.

In fact, I just realised, I've actually used a couple of the seagate ones on SATA150 Asus mobos, so I know they work fine.