Processor manufacturers may have hit hurdles with constant miniaturization years ago, but hard drive manufacturers have managed to keep forging ahead, packing more and more data onto a single drive. Seagate continued in this trend on Monday with the release of its 1 terabyte drives – yes, that’s 1,000 gigabytes.
The new drives are part of Seagate’s Barracuda line., with both enterprise and desktop versions. The Barracuda 7200.11 for consumers spins at that the standard 7200 rpm and delivers 105MB of data per second, which Seagate claims is the highest rate in its category. The Barracuda ES.2 for businesses adds features to boost reliability and power consumption, like Seagate’s PowerTrim and Rotational Vibration Feed Forward systems.
"Historians may consider the shipment of 1TB drives as a watershed event for the industry but users will consider such devices commonplace,” said John Monroe, a research vice president at the tech-analyst firm Gartner, in a statement. “We believe 1TB (and larger) drives will become ‘standard equipment’ in, on or near virtually every television set in the world as well as in a variety of multi-user environments.”
The new 1TB Baracuda drives will both begin shipping during the third quarter of 2007. The consumer-level 7200.11 will run for $399.99.
