Seagate is first off the blocks when it comes to a 1.5TB hard drive - at least by this August anyways. The Seagate 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 will feature a quartet of platters that will cram as much data as possible into the eleventh generation of its flagship drive. In fact, Seagate takes pride that this is by right the single largest hard drive capacity bump in the last half century - now isn’t that an achievement to crow about? After all, we keep on running out of space over time as we accumulate more and more digital junk, in addition to file formats getting much larger in size no thanks to the more powerful computers we’re “blessed” with. I’d personally prefer to store my data on Pioneer’s 16-layer disc that can hold as much as 400GB of data at one go, although searching through archives on that will be painfully slow compared to the hard drive.

The Seagate Barracude 7200.11 will spin at 7,200RPM, and connects via the SATA I interface to achieve 3Gb/s transfer rate as well as a sustained data rate of up to 120MB/s. Of course, the 1.5TB will probably cost a whole chunk of the layman’s salary, which is why Seagate has other choices for the budget conscious in the form of 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB, and 160GB varieties, accompanied by cache options of 32MB and 16MB.

Well, the Barracuda hard drive will target desktop users, so where does that leave us notebook totters? Thankfully Seagate engineers also have this group in mind, introducing a couple of 2.5″ 500GB hard drives under the Momentus line. These will be available in 5,400RPM and 7,200RPM variations, accompanied by 8MB of cache and 16MB of cache respectively. Both drives will feature free-fall sensor technology to prevent data damage when dropped by parking the heads off the disk whenever it detects any changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity, all within 3/10ths of a second.

Source: The Register