Seagate today announced shipment of its NL35 series to the channel- a family that some may remember was announced by the firm as early as April of last year. The drive targets the growing nearline sector, drives servicing data that require true real-time random access where capacity and cost concerns outweigh blinding speed. Drives such as Maxtor’s long-standing MaXLine series and WD’s newly announced Caviar RE2 target the same market.
The NL35 leverages much technology from Seagate’s venerable Barracuda ATA series. Available in the familiar 400 GB and 250 GB capacity points, the drive features a 9 millisecond seek time and comes with either 8 or 16 megabytes of buffer. The drive supports SATA NCQ. Interestingly, like the Caviar RE2 and unlike the Barracuda 7200.8 and the MaXLine III, the drive features a standard 150 MB/sec interface rather than the SATA-2 300 MB/sec. The firm claims that key improvements result in a more rugged product that achieves a 1 million hour MTBF and that is intended for light-duty 24/7 operation.
