The hard drive has seen some interesting crossroads during the years and the path it took so far has been a huge motivation for the computer industry. Now, we are faced with the challenge brought by memory-based storage devices: they are faster, more rugged and durable, but they are not as big. This being said, the only chance the spinning platters have of still being a noticeable presence on the market in the near future is either to lower the prices to a level where it would be more affordable to have them, to get to capacity levels beyond our current imagination, or even both.

Seagate is taking at least one of the steps I've mentioned earlier by approaching the 1TB barrier bit by bit. Though the competition of "who has the first terabyte hard drive" has already been won by Hitachi with their Deskstar 7K1000 model, that isn't going to slow them down. But this is just one of the battles that has been won, the war is far from over, and Seagate's acquisition of rival hard drive manufacturer, Maxtor, has taken them a little closer to having the monopole in the hard drive industry.

Other major players in this line of work have success through innovations, or by simply giving out something different than other manufacturers. Such is the case of Western Digital and their Raptor series of hard drives, the "fastest desktop drives in the world", to which they have added a transparent glass so that you can see the platters as they spin. But Seagate has had a big success on the market even before they bought Maxtor, and the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technology has taken the storage limits even higher than we previously thought possible.

According to Chilehardware.com, Seagate's new 7200.11 generation of hard drives will have the following specifications: 1 Terabyte capacity, 7200RPM, Serial ATA 3Gbps interface, Perpendicular Magnetic Recording, Native Command Queuing, 16MB of buffer, 4 platters and 8 heads. Although no official information from Seagate has been released, there are minor inconsistencies in these specs. First of all, SATA II standard specifies, among other things, the presence of Staggered Spin-Up, a technology encountered in SCSI drives and usually in the server business. This would mean that this generation of drives would still lack full SATA II compatibility, which is unlikely. Also, Hitachi used on their 7K1000 drive 32MB of buffer, and I believe that superceding the 7200.10 series which mostly use 16MB of buffer, 32MB would be required for this to be a viable solution to the market.