It has been around one and a half years since the first 1TB 3.5" hard drives were announced and up until recently, no larger capacity desktop hard drives have been launched apart from raid-based external drives. Now Seagate announces what it claims to be the industry's first 1.5TB desktop and 512GB laptop hard drives. According to Seagate, the leap to 1.5TB also marks the largest jump in hard disk capacity in the 1/2 century history of hard drives.
Its 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 7200rpm drive uses four platters and features a 3Gbps SATA connection. It can provide a sustained data transfer rate of up to 120MBps. Other drives from its 7200.11 series include capacities of 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB and 160GB, with a cache size choice of 16MB or 32MB. The new 2.5" Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 drives feature spindle speeds of 5400rpm and 7200rpm and cache sizes of 8MB and 16MB respectively. Both feature a 3Gbps SATA interface and use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology.
The new 1.5TB drive is set to begin shipping next month. The Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 drives are expected to start shipping in the 4th quarter. No pricing information has been announced at this time.
With 1TB drives now selling for around 1/3 of their launch price, it will be interesting to see what these drives will retail for, considering how long it has taken now for the capacity to go beyond 1TB. If the price is too high, chances are that only those with deep pockets will consider them.
I guess that's what happens when you post soon after getting up......
Time to put your glasses on...the article says the last 1/2 century, which is 50 years, so your comment about computers in the 50's still holds strong.
That's what Seagate said (see the source link), so I'm just going by their word.
It IS the single biggest in HD capacity in the last 1/2 century - really in the history of HDDs - it's a half terabyte increase. There were 750GB drives already on the market when the 1TB drives hit, that was only a 250GB increase - this is a 500GB increase...
Yeah, I just went over all the numbers on this and it turns out Dentman42 is bang on with his math. Now if they can just get that 5TB drive out the door I'll be putting all my DVDs onto an HTPC.
dentman42
think the 1/2 TB is for notbook drives
1.5TB on four platters = 375GB per platter. That's quite impressive. 
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