Seagate to Discontinue 7,200-RPM Drives, Will Others Follow?
Mar 4, 2013 11:28 AM EDT by Meghan McDonough 
The race for faster data access has a casualty. AnandTech got wind of a report from X-bit Labs that Seagate will discontinue its 2.5-inch laptop-size 7,200-rpm hard drives by the end of this year. The move comes as prices for solid state drives continue to fall while offering more storage space. Seagate currently has three 7,200-rpm drives on the market, the Momentus 7200.4, 7200.2 and Momentus Thin 7200, and one hybrid drive, the Momentus XT. This drive combines a 7,200-rpm drive with 8GB of SLC NAND for caching.
This news does make us a bit sad, because we’ve always enjoyed the combination of disk size, speed and price that 7,200-rpm drives offered compared with their slower 5,400-rpm cousins. Granted, SSDs will smoke almost any 7,200-rpm drive in a data access race, but 7,200-rpm drives have a much more reasonable price per gigabyte.
It seems that Seagate shares our affinity for a balance of storage and speed. In part, they are ditching the 7,200-rpm market to focus on hybrid drives, an emerging category from which no manufacturer has risen to the top. We’re sure to see more variations on the Momentus XT come to market and perhaps some dual drive solutions as well.
In the meantime, if you’re a fan of Seagate’s 7,200-rpm drives, start hoarding them now.
via AnandTech
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May 4th, 2013 at 9:32 am
If I read the article right, they’re only discontinuing the 2.5″ 7200 rpm laptop drives. For laptops, SSDs make a lot more sense. The “full-size” (3.5″) drives, as used in most desktop computers and servers, will continue to be produced. They’re up around 4TB now, I think.
May 6th, 2013 at 12:13 pm
Why do I see this as backwards? If anything, drop the 3.5″ drives that are less than 2tb. Laptop drives are much smaller and should already be the standard for desktops, at least in corporate settings.
May 9th, 2013 at 11:51 am
Hah… not hardly… let them go… quickly… Seagate/Maxtor have had the worst MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) rate in the industry… even their internal service folks admit this… so why fret when the red-headed step child wants to go away.
May 16th, 2013 at 12:19 am
Does this even matter? I quit buying Seagate drives years ago when they decided to stop building quality drives.