New Seagate Hard Drive Paves Way For 2TB Monster

Seagate has released a 1TB hard disk drive, the Barracuda 7200.12 HD, which packs only two 500GB platters, meaning that a four-platter 2TB hard disk drive should be announced in the next few months.

Platters inside the 7200.12 pack up to 329 Gigabits per square inch which is apparently the industry's highest areal density (at least when it comes to desktop drives) although the Register states that Hitachi has already released a device with a 375 Gigabits per square inch areal density.

The 7200.12 uses a SATA-2 Interface which has a theoretical burst speed of 3 Gigabits per second and come with 32MB cache. No pricing or availability details have been provided yet.

The higher platter capacity should allow the hard disk drive to perform extremely well, especially when it comes to sustained data rates, which according to Seagate should reach 160MBps up from 115MBps on its previous generation drive.

Seagate currently holds the world record when it comes to disc capacity with a 1.5TB desktop HDD which was announced back in July 2008 while Hitachi unveiled the first Terabyte hard disk drive back in January 2007.

It is widely believed that 2.5TB or even 3TB hard disk drives should be available by the end of the year. 

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