Seagate takes a perpendicular leap in Disk Capacity

Seagate’s announcement of a 750GB, Barracuda 7200.10 drive marks a quantam leap in the world of disk capacity. The disk is 50 percent larger than the largest drives available till now. The company also announced an expected arrival of 750 GB external drive by coming week.

The suggested retail price of the 750-Gbyte Barracuda 7200.10 drive will be $ 590. The drives began shipping last week to distributors, said Michael Hall, a Seagate spokesman.

The drive which comes with a standard 5 year warranty, is ideal for system builders requiring the industry’s leading combination of hard drive capacity, performance and reliability for single-user systems such as desktop PC RAID, digital editing, hot-rod gaming, single-drive external storage and consumer PCs. The drives also provide the high throughput and low cost-per-gigabyte storage required for multi-user systems such as low-cost servers for small offices.

"With data center storage requirements increasing at a rate of 50 percent to 60 percent per year, and users storing more hours of digitized video on hard disk drives, demand is growing for disk drives with higher storage capacities," said John Rydning, IDC’s Research Manager for hard disc drives. "Seagate’s new Barracuda 7200.10 ups the ante for desktop-class drives, providing up to 750GB of capacity to meet these growing storage needs."

"For the last fifty years, we’ve used longitudinal recording to store information across the surface of the disk," Hall said. "Now, we’ve made the leap to perpendicular, and we’ve increased the storage by 50 percent."

Longitudinal recording, as its name indicates, aligns the data bits horizontally, parallel to the surface of the disk.

In contrast, perpendicular recording aligns the bits vertically, perpendicular to the disk, which allows additional room on a disk to pack more data, thus, enabling higher recording densities.