Seagate packs 1.5TB into thin drive
Large but also somehow thin.
By Martyn Williams, IDG News Service | Published: 07:58, 06 January 2009
Seagate has begun volume shipments of a new desktop hard-disk drive that offers 1TB of storage space across two disks.
What makes the drives special isn't the capacity - a 1.5TB drive from the same company is already available - but the density at which data is stored on each of the disk platters inside the drive.
Seagate's 7200.11 drives spread the 1.5TBs across four disk platters but the new Barracuda 7200.12HD drives manage to store 1TB of data across just two platters.
That works out to a storage density, called areal density in the industry, of 329GB per square inch - the highest yet for any hard-disk drive, according to Seagate.
The new 7,200 rpm drive is targeted at desktop personal computers, desktop RAID systems and external storage and has a Serial ATA 3Gbits/s interface. Versions of the disk drive will also be available in 750GB and 500GB capacities, said Seagate.
