Scotts Valley (CA) – Seagate reclaims storage capacity leadership in the hard drive market with a 1.5 TB drive, which represents a stunning 50% improvement over the largest drives currently available on the market.

Just yesterday we reported about Hitachi GST’s new 3.5” drive, which features a substantial increase in storage density (320-375 GB per disk), but kept the maximum storage capacity at 1 TB: While the previous 1 TB drive used five disks to hit 1 TB (5 x 200 GB), the new model uses only three (3 x 333 GB) in an effort to reduce the power consumption of the device. Seagate, which has been trailing the rest of the hard drive industry in terms of storage capacity for more than two years, today said that it matches the storage density of Hitachi’s new 750 GB model (2 x 375 GB) and will offer a hard drive with four disks and a capacity of 1.5 TB (4 x 375 GB) beginning in August.

The 3.5” Barracuda 7200.11 drive is also offered in capacities of 1TB, 750 GB, 640GB, 500 GB, 320 GB and 160 GB with cache options of 32 MB and 16 MB.

The big increase in storage density has been made possible through perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, which was first introduced in Seagate’s 2.5” 160 GB drives about 30 months ago. Seagate said it is also updating its 2.5” drives soon with 5400 rpm mainstream models and 7200 rpm performance versions offering up to 500 GB of capacity.

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.  

Shipments of the Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 hard drives are scheduled to begin in Q4 2008.

Pricing has not been announced.

Yay!

Jul 10, 2008 12:32     

I love Seagate!
Kalt report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1

wow

Jul 10, 2008 13:12     

I remember when 1GB was a LOT. I'm sure there was a time when 128mb was "more than we'll ever need"...
Jay report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +3

Cool! I figured someone would make 1.5 TB soon.

Jul 10, 2008 14:57     

My first IBM computer had dual 5.25 floppies and no hard drive. hehe, I considered it a step up from my C64 which only had one 5.25 floppy and it wasn't dual density so it only had 178K of drive storage instead of 360K. And yeah, there was a day when I envied people with over 128MB HD.
ground zero report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +4

I hate Seagate! Go to WD all way.

Jul 10, 2008 16:18     

Western Digital win and Seagate loser. Western Digital have best technology than Seagate do. I don't trust Seagate anymore. 1 TB and above will lost your files easily! That sad. I hope Western Digital company will sue Seagate company.
Guest86 report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -16

less platters, same capacity = faster?

Jul 10, 2008 17:41     

HA! I remember getting an external wide-SCSI based 1.0 GB HDD. I believe it was over $500 at the time, and it was the size of a dictionary! Actually, I believe I still have it in storage somewhere. Amazing how far we have come. On a separate note, wouldn't an HDD with less platters but the same capacity be much faster since it doesn't have to jump around to much? Like say the new Hitachi 3-disk 1.0TB vs the old 5-disk version?

Loosely_coupled report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +5

WOOT!!

Jul 10, 2008 18:41     

I Agree with Guest86, despite his absolutely shocking English!.... WD PWNS!
R report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -8

I'll say

Jul 10, 2008 19:19     

My first HD was all of 80 MB, and my ComputerLand boss asked me what I was going to do with all that space.
Pete Dixon report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +2

old harddrives

Jul 10, 2008 20:23     

1.5 TBytes...it just keeps getting better. I remember saving up for a 5 MByte harddrive. It cost $10,000 at teh time, the price dropped to $5,000 by the time I had saved up $2,000. Quite a feat for a kid working at a fast food joint. I never bought that harddrive. The progress in the computer industry has taught me to wait and wait some more and then only buy when you can't wait anymore knowing that just after you buy everything will be half the price for twice the performance.

stancilmor report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +2

Makes me sound old but...

Jul 10, 2008 21:14     

My first HD was a 64 MB MFM. When I bought my 428 MB seagate HD I thought I would NEVER EVER fill it... Now I have 2 TB for my home server! Crazy!
Action Jackson report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +3

Re: pete

Jul 10, 2008 21:33     

why pete... you could store what, 27-28 floppy disks in that space... I bet I could fill it... lol I remember those days too :D
Scott report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +2

I'm the youngest one here. My first computer had a ...

Jul 11, 2008 05:09     

I'm the youngest one here. My first computer had a 250 MB HDD (small in comparison) and 16 MB RAM (big in comparison), which means I got it later than most of you, which means I'm younger... Great way to judge people by the size of their first HDD!
Virtualban report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +2

IBM's first 5MB HDD....

Jul 11, 2008 09:38     

http://graphics2.snopes.com/ph...ddrive.jpg http://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/storage.asp HAHA. Now you can fit 6,400 times more capacity in your pocket with a 32GB flash drive. I'm glad I didn't have to carry that around in my pocket, but if I could I probably would being the true geek that I am. :)
nobody report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1