Seagate launches world’s first 1.5 terabyte hard disk drive

Hitachi may be launching a more efficient version of its one-terabyte hard disk drive (See: Hitachi revolutionizes ''Tera Era'' with new 1-terabyte hard disk drive), but rival Seagate proposes to go one step further, in fact, quite a few steps, by raising the benchmark for maximum capacity by a whopping 50 per cent. For those who find 1 terabytes of storage space a trifle less than their requirements, they can put their money on Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11.

The new HDD (hard disk drive), according to Seagate, uses just four platters for its 1.5TB of storage and makes use of perpendicular magnetic recording technology for capacity boosting. This 3.5-inch internal hard drive also sports a Serial ATA 3GB/sec interface for a reported sustained data rate of up to 120MB/second.

In addition to this desktop drive, the company also two 500 GB HDDs meant for notebooks. Called the Momentus, they will be offered in 5,400 and 7,200 RPM flavors called the Momentus 5400.6 and Momentus 7200.4 respectively. The 5,400RPM drive will have an 8MB cache while the 7,200 RPM version will have 16MB.

Both Momentus drives are built tough enough to withstand up to 1,000 Gs of non-operating shock and 350 Gs of operating shock to protect drive data, making the drives ideal for systems that are subject to rough handling or high levels of vibration.

For added robustness in mobile environments, the Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 are offered with G-Force Protection, a free-fall sensor technology that helps prevent drive damage and data loss upon impact if a laptop PC is dropped. The sensor works by detecting any changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity and parks the heads off the disc to prevent contact with the platter in a free fall of as little as 8 inches and within 3/10ths of a second.

While the Barracuda will be available from next month onwards, the Momentus drives will show up in stores towards the end of this year. All of them come with Seagate's characteristic five-year warranty.

Highlighting the global growth of digital content, Seagate expects to ship its two billionth hard drive within the next five years. Earlier this year Seagate shipped its one billionth hard drive since the company's inception nearly 30 years ago.

''Organizations and consumers of all kinds worldwide continue to create, share and consume digital content at levels never before seen, giving rise to new markets, new applications and demand for desktop and notebook computers with unprecedented storage capacity, performance and reliability,'' said Michael Wingert, Seagate executive vice president and general manager, Personal Compute Business.

''Seagate is committed to powering the next generation of computing today with the planet's fastest, highest-capacity and most reliable storage solutions,'' he added.