Western Digital had recently announced the world's only 2TB hard disk drive. Today Seagate announced its own. The Constellation HDD family is an enterprise storage solution designed for Tier 2 nearline storage applications. The latest Seagate family include two models, the 2.5-inch Constellation and the 3.5-inch Constellation ES hard drives. The Constellation 2.5-inch hard drive is offered in capacities of 160GB and 500GB with both 3 Gbps SATA and new SAS 2.0 interface running at 6Gb/s speeds. On the other hand, the 3.5-inch 7,200RPM Constellation ES hard drive will be available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities, and with an enterprise-class SAS interface as well as a SATA version.

Both drives include PowerChoice from Seagate, which decreases power consumption by up to 54% for record power savings in enterprise environments. They also offer optional self-encrypting drive (SED) technology and provide government-grade data security through the drive’s life cycle. SED technology makes drive retirement and disposal easy by eliminating the need for the numerous manual processes involved which are often incomplete, complex, expensive, or prone to error. For critical information that must remain secure, and because all systems are eventually retired, whether being relocated, re-purposed, or disposed of, the information on a Constellation SED hard drive remains AES-safe.

The Constellation family will begin shipping this quarter, while the Constellation ES hard drive will ship in calendar Q3.