Seagate ushers in Terabyte hard drive era

Stan Beer
Thursday, 27 April 2006 05:08

Business IT - Technology

Seagate's new perpendicular hard drive technology looks set to usher in the era of Terabyte storage, with the announcement of its new 750GB hard drive, the Barracuda 7200.10. Put two in your desktop and you're now into the Terabyte league, the sort of storage capacity once reserved for mainframes and supercomputers.

The new technology enables bits of data to be stored in a perpendicular format rather than longitudinally and, thus enables the magnetic disc to store significantly more data in the same space. With fatter broadband pipes becoming available, better quality LCD screens and the availability of movie downloads, the need for more storage is becoming prevalent.

The new technology not only provides greater capacity but less moving parts and lower power consumption. The drive is also comparatively cheap at around $560.