Seagate's latest HDD is really, really dense: great news!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 04 May 2011 20:41

Your IT - Home IT

Seagate has finally broken the 'areal density barrier' and has unveiled the world's first hard drive with 1TB on each platter and will have it on sale soon, in 'mid-2011'.

With the 1TB (Terabyte) per hard drive platter and an 'industry's highest' areal density of 625 Gigabits per square inch now achieved by Seagate, the race to continue innovating in hard drive technologies continues alongside the pace of SSD development.

It's also not the first time a claim of 1TB per platter has been made this year - Samsung claimed this back at CeBIT in Germany in March this year, as reported by Heise Online (in German), and while Samsung is quoted to have spoken of 3TB and 4TB capacities later this year, Seagate looks like it will have products out in the hands of consumers first.

With hard drives still offering the biggest bang for your storage buck, SSD sales are still vastly outpaced by hard drive sales, although the trend for premium slim and light notebook computers shipping with SSD drives as standard is clearly growing.

However, as long as SSDs remain significantly more expensive than HDDs, hard drive capacities will continue growing and delivering storage to the vast majority of the world's desktop and notebook computers.

This makes Seagate's announcement significant, for it breaks one barrier and sets up the next, while allowing the delivery of a single 3TB drive using three 1TB platters.

It will also 'help meet explosive worldwide demand for digital content storage in both the home and the office', as Seagate unsurprisingly states, as it clearly works to fill as much of that demand as possible.

Seagate has chosen the 'GoFlex Desk' retail range of external hard drives to feature the technology first, and will come in 1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB and 3TB models.

The actual Seagate hard drive model to come with the new technology is its flagship 3.5-inch 'Barracuda' drive, featuring 3TBs of storage on 3 disk platters.

To put this into perspective, Seagate explains that this is 'enough capacity to store up to 120 high-definition movies, 1,500 video games, thousands of photos or virtually countless hours of digital music'.

Continued on page two, please read on.