Seagate drives ahead to 1.5T

By Stephen Withers
Friday, 11 July 2008 11:28

Technology

You can't be too rich, and you can't have too much storage. Seagate obviously agrees with the latter, as it has announced the first 1.5T desktop drive and the first 500G notebook drives. You'll have to wait to find out what they'll do to your bank balance, but the way drive prices have been falling we doubt they'll do too much damage.

The Barracuda 7200.11 should be pretty speedy, with four platters spinning at 7200 rpm, 3Gbit/sec SATA, 16M or 32M cache, and a sustained data rate of 120Mbyte/sec.

The drive is the eleventh generation in Seagate's Barracuda series. Deliveries will begin in August.

Several factors are driving the demand for high capacity hard disks, including ever-growing collections of digital photographs, home videos, digital music and other audio content such as podcasts, and downloaded and off-air recordings of TV shows.

Furthermore, there has been a marked switch away from backing up on removable media such as DVD-R and various tape formats to disk-to-disk backup. This is epitomised by Apple's Time Machine software in Mac OS X and its Time Capsule shared storage and network router appliance.

The demand for extra storage capacity also applies to the notebook market, and that's where Seagate's Momentus 5400.6 and Momentus 7200.4 hard drives fit in.

The 5400rpm model will be available in versions from 120G to 500G, while the 7200rm model will come in capacities from 250G to 500G.

Are these drives tough enough for the mobile market? Please read on.