Seagate announces world’s first 1.5TB hard drive

Posted at: 11:19pm 10th July 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

The Barracuda 7200.11 offers a huge jump in capacity of 500GB over its predecessor

While hard drive capacities usually creep up gradually by a few gigabytes when you’re not looking, Seagate has just bucked the trend by announcing a massive increase of 500GB with its new 1.5TB 3.5in desktop drive.

Seagate is proud of this achievement, and even claims that it ‘marks the single largest capacity hard drive jump in the more than half-century history of hard drives – a half-terabyte increase from the previous highest capacity of 1TB.’ The company says this is all thanks to the drive’s use of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, which stores bits vertically, rather than horizontally, allowing you to squeeze more bits onto a platter.

The new drive stores its 1.5TB wealth of data over four platters, and Seagate claims that it’s capable of achieving a sustained data rate of 120MB/sec. As well as the 1.5TB drive, the Barracuda 7200.11 series will also be available in capacities of 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB and 160GB, with 16MB and 32MB cache options.

Seagate has been in the hard drive business for a long time, and its original ST-506 drive (when the company was known as Shugart) was the first hard drive to fit in a standard 5.25in drive bay. The company boasted that it had shipped its billionth hard drive earlier this year, but it reckons it will only take five years before it ships its second billionth drive.

Seagate plans to start shipping the new 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 drive in August this year.