News

posted on 10 July 2008 17:20

Seagate has taken the hard disk capacity lead triumphantly with an astonishing 1.5 terabyte 3.5-inch hard drive and it's also announced half-terabyte notebook (2.5-inch) drives.

Yesterday Hitachi GST announced its second generation terabyte drive with enhanced power efficiency and a 3-platter design. Seagate has trumped that by adding another platter.

The 4-platter Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB SATA hard drive is the eleventh generation of Seagate’s flagship drive for desktop PCs, and a third generation of perpendicular recording technology. It also marks the single largest capacity hard drive jump, 500GB, in the more than half-century history of hard drives.

The drive is targeted at mainstream desktop computers, workstations, desktop RAID, gaming and high-end PCs, and USB/FireWire/eSATA external storage. It has a 3Gbit/s SATA I interface with a sustained data rate of up to 120MB/sec and is offered in capacities of 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB and 160GB with cache options of 32MB and 16MB.

Apparently full disk encryption isn't offered.

Seagate’s new 2.5-inch half-terabyte Momentus 5400.6 and Momentus 7200.4 are for mainstream and high-performance notebook computers, external storage solutions, PCs and industrial applications requiring a small form factor. Both have the 3Gbit/s SATA interface.

The Momentus 5400.6, a 5400-rpm drive, has capacities ranging from 120GB to 500GB with an 8MB cache. The 7,200rpm Momentus 7200.4 hard drive has a 16MB cache and capacities from 250GB to 500GB. 

They are offered with G-Force Protection, a free-fall sensor technology that helps prevent drive damage and data loss upon impact if a laptop PC is dropped. The sensor works by detecting any changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity and parks the heads off the disc to prevent contact with the platter in a free fall of as little as 8 inches and within 3/10ths of a second.

Seagate is now leading Western Digital in the notebook drive capacity stakes as WD hasn't yet announced a 500GB 2.5-inch drive.

All three new Seagate drives come with a 5-year warranty. Shipments of the Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB are set to begin August 2008. Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 hard drives are to begin shipping in Q4 calendar 2008.

Note. Ironically, if Hitachi GST had used four platters it too could have offered a 1.5TB drive as its platter capacity is 375GB. This suggests it and Seagate are running level in the platter areal density stakes.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}