We've already seen the industry's first 2.5-inch 1TB consumer hard drive courtesy of Western Digital, but Seagate has announced what it claims to be the first enterprise-grade solution. The company today introduced its 1TB 2.5-inch Constellation.2 drive, which is designed for server applications in environments that range from small and medium businesses to large enterprise data centers.

The Constellation.2 ships in 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB capacities with interface options including 6Gb/s SATA or SAS. The 250GB version is SATA only, and it's worth noting that the Constellation.2 is only rated for a maximum sustained transfer rate of 115MB/s, so it won't utilize the extra headroom a 6Gb/s interface provides anyway. Other features include a 64MB cache and a 7200RPM rotation speed.


Power levels vary between configurations. Drives with SAS consume 3.85W at idle and 6.4W under load. That's cut by half a watt when using SATA, and Seagate's "PowerChoice" feature supposedly cuts idle draw by over 50%. All models are accompanied by a five-year warranty and have a MTBF of 1.4 million hours, which has been increased from the 1.2 million hour rating of the Constellation.1.

Segate hasn't mentioned pricing, but it did say that Dell would be offering the Constellation.2 in its machines by late December. Being made for servers and all, we should note that the drives pack four 250GB platters and measure 14.8mm thick, which means they probably won't fit in your mobile computer. Notebook drives are typically 9.5mm tall or 12.5mm for high capacity three-platter models.