By Craig Zammit
SYDNEY: Seagate Technology, one of the largest global manufacturers of hard drives, has pushed the boundaries of data storage further by introducing the world’s largest desktop hard drive at 750 gigabytes.
The new hard drive, the world’s first to hit the 750GB mark, forms part of the Barracuda 7200.10 family and is built on perpendicular recording technology. This technology allows data to be stacked vertically on the disc media as opposed to horizontally, as is the current industry standard.
Orienting data in this manner allows for increased drive throughput by sending more data bits under the drive head in the same amount of time, leaving the spin speed constant.
“Strong demand for personal computers and servers with unprecedented storage capacity continues as organisations and consumers worldwide rely on ever-higher volumes of digital content,” said Seagate senior vice president and general manager – personal storage, Karl Chicca.
The new hard drive is currently being shipped through Seagate Technology’s worldwide distribution channel and increases Seagate’s perpendicular recording technology to desktop, notebook, enterprise, consumer electronics and retail hard drives.
“Underscoring recent trends is the petabytes of music, photos, movies, computer games and other digital content spawned by the proliferation of consumer electronics services and devices. All of this information feeds a growing need for storage in what is fast becoming the centre of the digital lifestyle – the home PC,” he said.
John Rydning, hard disc drive research manager for IDC, believes storage capacities are increasing rapidly every year.
“With data centre storage requirements increasing at a rate of 50 per cent to 60 per cent each year, and users storing more hours of digitised video on hard disk drives, demand is growing for disk drives with higher storage capacities,” he said.
Chicca believes Seagate has an industry leading combination of performance, capacity and reliability, which allows consumers to increase their storage needs when required.
“Seagate is meeting these requirements with the hard drive industry’s most advanced storage capabilities, and we’ll continue to develop leading drives and technologies that will enable organisations and consumers to remain ahead of the capacity, performance and reliability curve,” said Chicca.
Seagate’s Barracuda range provides hard drives from 200GB up to 750GB capacity with data density of 130 Gigabits per square inch, which equates to 188 Gigabits per disc.
Pricing for the new 750GB hard drive stands at RRP $980 for the SATA model and RRP $970 for the PATA model, with each backed by Seagate’s five year warranty.