Seagate’s 1.5TB HDD pushes consumer storage boundaries

by Stevie Smith - Jul 11 2008, 10:48

Yesterday The Tech Herald revealed Hitachi GST’s new second-generation Deskstar, a mammoth consumer hard drive boasting 1TB of gaping storage space. However, seeming intent on stealing Hitachi’s rolling thunder, data storage specialist Seagate Technology has trumped the Deskstar with its 1.5TB Barracuda drive.

Described by Scotts Valley-based Seagate as the industry’s very first 1.5TB hard disk drive (HDD), the new Barracuda drive is being positioned to attend to the ever-growing need for more digital-content storage in the home and within business environments.

While the new 3.5-inch Barracuda 7200.11 arrives as the 11th generation of Seagate’s longstanding flagship drive series, the Californian technology company is also keen to point out that it brings with it the largest ever capacity jump for hard drive devices -- a half terabyte (500GBs) more than the previous capacity ceiling of 1TB.

If you listen carefully, you can hear Hitachi GST vehemently grinding its corporate teeth while shooting evil looks at its new Deskstar.

Built on capacity-boosting perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, the 1.5TB Barracuda is being aimed specifically at mainstream desktop PCs, workstations, desktop RAID, enthusiast computer gaming, high-end PCs, and also USB/FireWire/eSATA external storage.

“The Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive combines the capacity and speed required for today’s most demanding desktop PC applications,” outlined Seagate in an official release. “Seagate is committed to powering the next generation of computing today with the planet’s fastest, highest-capacity and most reliable storage solutions.”

Beyond delivering its 1.5TB of storage courtesy of four platters the Barracuda also offers up it speedy Serial ATA 3Gbps interface and an “industry-leading” sustained data rate of up to 120Mbps for fast bootup, application startup, and file access times.

Equipped with its vast storage ceiling of 1.5TB, the Barracuda line also comes in varied sizing flavours to fit specific consumer tastes, which include 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 320GB, 160GB, and cache options for 32MB and 16MB.

The 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 HDD is set to begin shipping in August of this year. No concrete pricing structure has been released by Seagate Technology at this point.

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