Seagate ships highest density desktop disk drive

Seagate is now shipping its densest desktop hard drive, the Barracuda 7200.12, which offers 1TB of capacity on two disks. The drive is a 3.5-in. disk that spins at 7,200 rpm and has an areal density of 329 gigabits per square inch. Seagate said it expects to add platters using the same technology later this year to achieve even larger total capacity.

"Demand for more desktop PC storage capacity is far from letting up, as computer users worldwide generate massive amounts of digital content every day," Tom Major, vice president of Seagate's Personal Compute Business, said in a statement.

The Barracuda 7200.12's serial ATA 3Gbit/sec. interface delivers a sustained data transfer rate of up to 160MB/second and a burst speed of 3Gbit/sec. The drive is also offered in capacities of 750GB and 500GB, with cache options of 32MB and 16MB. Seagate said it achieved the aerial density of the 7200.12 by using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology .

Seagate's highest density disk prior to the 7200.12 was its Barracuda 7200.11, which offered 1.5TB of capacity on a four-platter, 3.5-in. desktop drive.

Seagate has not announced retail prices for the drive as of yet, but a 500GB 7200.12 drive is available at Newegg.com for US$64.99.

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