Seagate has announced the world's first 1TB Drive with an SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) Interface. The enterprise-class 1GB Barracuda ES.2 (ST31000640SS) hard drive joins a product line that already includes 500GB and 750GB SAS drives and provides low cost per GB solutions for business critical environments.

The performance advantage of the new drive over the standard SATA interface drive means that applications addressing rich media content and collaborative applications like e-mail can benefit from the average 135 percent performance boost, with the added bonus of robust enterprise features including dual-port capability with redundancy and native compatibility, and a MTBF of 1.2 million hours. The drive comes with a 5-year warranty.

By using Seagate's PowerTrim technology, which dynamically manages the drive's power consumption at all levels of activity, the Barracuda ES.2 provides savings in power consumption, with a 20 percent reduction in overall power consumed, offering a claimed best in class reduction in watts per gigabyte of 55 percent.

The new drive features a 3.0Gbps interface with a 16MB cache, a 7,200rpm spin speed and a 8.5ms random read seek time. It also has Seagate's RVFF (Rotational Vibration Feed Forward) system, designed to sustain performance in densely-packed multi-drive systems.