David Flynn14 July 2008, 10:00 AM
Fatter platters in the Barracuda and Momentus series see new drives soars to 1.5TB on the desktop and 500MB for notebooks.
Desktop hard disks have parked their heads at the 1TB mark for almost 18 months, since Hitachi won the race to 1,000GB in early 2007. But from next month you’ll be able to toss another 500GB of downloads onto your PC. That’s when Seagate begins shipping the 1.5TB flagship drive in its Barracuda 7200.11 family.
The drive will employ four platters of 375GB apiece, compared to a quad serve of 250GB platters in the current 1TB drive, running at the Serial ATA 3Gb/second spec and up to 32MB of disk cache for a claimed sustained data rate ‘of up to 120MB/second’.
Notebooks are also in for a welcome boost, with the new Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 drives zooming to 500GB by year’s end. Considering that Seagate’s current peak portable capacity is 320GB, this is a massive leap.
It also paves the way for a half-terrabyte push into two distinct markets: the mainstream consumer segment for the 5400rpm model, which leans towards lower noise and longer battery life due to its mid-range rotation speed, and the gaming and performance segment for the 7200rpm drive. The drives are respectively cached at 8MB and 16MB and both sport the speedy Serial ATA 3Gb/second interface. Both the desktop and notebook drives are covered by a five year warranty.