The real story behind Seagate’s Constellation ES 2TB

Yesterday, Seagate announced availability of it’s 4th generation enterprise nearline drive (Constellation ES) with up to 2TB of capacity.

The 2TB milestone on this drive is not necessarily the headline grab.  The real story with Constellation ES is the 6Gb SAS interface.  For the past few years, Seagate and others have worked to transition the enterprise market from SCSI and Fibre Channel to SAS, and by in large the transition has been a success, except for the burgeoning market for low cost nearline storage solutions that utilize SATA drives.

Seagate hopes to change that. Leading the way, Seagate brought 3Gb SAS to the nearline space with the previous 3.5-inch version Barracuda ES2, and it’s 2.5-inch brother Constellation. Today, the envelope gets pushed further with Constellation ES boasting twice the interface speed with 6Gb SAS.   Of course, Constellation ES is also available in a  SATA 3Gb version, but judging from Seagate’s announcement, 6Gb SAS is more ready for primetime in the nearline space and thus first to market.

Perhaps the enterprise ecosystem is just not ready to take advantage of SATA 6Gb. All that work transitioning the market to SAS has paid off. The market is conditioned to take advantage of 6Gb SAS today, and once again, Seagate is attempting to lead the way.

I am not going to go into the virtues of SAS over SATA. You can get that here.

Instead, let’s bring light to the real story here… Seagate wants the market to go  SAS.   It’s just a matter of time before the others sing the same tune.

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