Seagate Technology, which reinforced its hard drive position by acquiring rival Maxtor, is offering a desktop hard drive that stores as much as 750 gigabytes of data.
Previous computer hard drives maxed out at 500GB.
But Seagate’s new, self-described “monster” Barracuda 7200.10 line of desktop drives uses perpendicular recording technology to provide more performance than storage machines built with traditional longitudinal architectures.
Perpendicular technology stands data bits vertically onto the surface of disc media, rather than situating data horizontally the way traditional longitudinal recording does.
The effect spruces up machines with more density and capacity, Seagate said in a statement.
By situating the data vertically, the drives also increase throughput without increasing spin speed by allowing more data bits to pass under the drive head in the same amount of time.
Greater capacity and throughput is important at a time when consumers are sucking up petabytes of music, photos and movies, computer games and other forms of digital content and storing them on their home machines.
Seagate is targeting the Barracuda 7200.10 family for computer system makers who would like to offer the hard drives as support for desktop PC storage, digital editing, gaming, single-drive external storage and consumer computers.
The 7200.10 is the final piece of Seagate’s strategy for selling all kinds of drives with perpendicular technology, including desktop, notebook, enterprise, consumer electronics and retail machines.
The Barracuda 7200.10 family stores anywhere from 200GB to 750GB of capacity Barracuda; includes cache sizes from 8 megabytes to 16MB; and shuttles data from 1.5 gigabit per second to 3.0Gb/s with native command queuing.
Native command queuing boosts reliability in heavy workloads by reducing head movement and smoothing the delivery of queued commands to the drive.
Seagate competes with Western Digital and Hitachi in the HDD market.
