Introduction - Seagate Medalist 1640 Product Manual

Medalist 1640 and 2140 Product Manual, January 1996 1

Introduction

This manual describes the functional, mechanical and interface specifi-
cations for the Medalist ™ 1640 and 2140 hard disc drives. The drives are
referred to throughout this manual by their model numbers, ST31640A
for the Medalist 1640 and ST32140A for the Medalist 2140.
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The Seagate ST31640A and ST32140A are high-capacity, Fast ATA-2
performance drives. The drives' features include: 3 and 4 data-surfaces
respectively, 5,376-RPM spindle speed, embedded servo technology, a
16-bit internal microprocessor and an intelligent controller. These fea-
tures and others combine to give you high-performance, high-capacity
and energy-efficient drives.
Fast ATA-2 offers you the twin-performance advantage of larger data-
volume transferred at higher speeds. Fast ATA-2 assures you of PIO
mode 4 and multiword DMA mode 2 for burst transfer rates of up to 16.6
Mbytes per second. (The drives support all PIO and all multiword DMA
transfer modes. The transfer rate for any given operation depends on
1
capability of the entire system. ) Fast ATA-2 also means that Multiple
block read/write is supported. This feature allows multiple blocks of data
to be stored in cache and transferred in a single burst. These features
make the drives responsive to the demands of high-performance Pen-
tium and PowerPC-class microprocessors and VL and PCI Local Bus
architectures.
These 5,400-RPM class drives use embedded servo technology to
ensure quick and accurate access to information on the drive without
thermal recalibration interruptions. They use a 16-bit internal microproc-
essor that is more responsive to 32-bit operating systems and an
intelligent controller that provides data streaming----direct data transfers
between the host and the drive without microprocessor intervention.
These features increase the sustained data-transfer rate, facilitating
video playback and other multimedia operations. Coupled with the
1.62-Gbyte and 2.11-Gbyte capacities, the drives have more than
enough capacity to download and play back a complete CD-ROM.
The ST31640A and ST32140A are energy-efficient drives. They feature
the power modes defined in the ATA-2 standard. Standby and Sleep
modes reduce power consumption to a low 0.755 watts (typical). The
drives enter power-saving modes at the request of the computer and can
be programmed to automatically enter Idle or Standby modes. (The ATA
commands with specific applications for the drives and the Seagate-
unique commands the drives use are discussed in Section 3.0 on page
25. A complete listing of the commands the drive supports is found in the
table on page 27. )
1. In computers that support the highest levels of performance, the drive may exceed some
of the listed specifications.