Seagate Details 2TB Constellation ES SATA 3.0 Drive

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Seagate just took the wraps off of it’s newest offering, a new drive in its Constellation series that is about as high-end as a hard drive can get, not only does it have 2TB of space (as big as you can get a commercially available hard drive these days) but also has support for a SATA 3.0 interface a fast SAS 6Gbps interface.

Seagate’s Constellation ES drives are nothing new, but Seagate loves to point out that their new drive is the world’s first 2TB drive with SATA 3.0 support, SAS 6Gbps, which gives it a transfer rate of 6Gbps (edit – the following is true, but irrelevant to this drive, see further explanation at bottom).(SATA 2.0, had a transfer rate of 3.0 Gbps and was commonly called SATA 3, so the new SATA 3.0 with 6Gbps is confusing to all, except for those who name such things)

Seagate’s Constellation ES drives are “enterprise-grade”, meaning they offer a 7200RPM speed with “best-in-class” parts for an always-on server type application. The drives also have things like Seagates’ PowerChoice power consumption technology as well as improved cooling and government-grade encryption security options.

SATA 3.0 (6Gbps) is nothing new to Seagate, as they were the first to show off a hard drive that used the new SATA interface. (edit – also true, but also irrelevant) No word on pricing, but Seagate also plans to release 1TB and 500GB Constellation ES class hard drives with the SATA 3 SAS 6Gbps and enterprise-grade features, which should be easier on the budget.

Nothing else on a release date, either. Don’t hold your breath for them – Seagate’s older Constellation ES drives (covered in the TFTS article that I deeplinked too above) were announced last February and didn’t start shipping to consumers until Fall. So it’s possible we might get these in time for Christmas.

(Edit – Thanks to Mark from Seagate for pointing out my errors here, while the new Constellation ES drive will have a 6Gbps transfer rate, this drive does it with SAS (serial attached SCIS), not the new SATA 3.0 standard. Apologies to all, don’t mind my strikeouts.)