14 DAY TRIAL // Seagate has just become the first company to announce that is has developed a hard drive that breaks the 1TB per platter density barrier to help meet the ever increasing worldwide demand for digital content storage.
According to the company, the new hard drives have an areal density of 625 Gigabits per square inch, which Seagate states is the highest density achieved in the HDD industry.
For now, the drive will only be used for the company's GoFlex Desk line of external hard drives, which range in capacity for 1TB to 3TB and also offer USB 3.0 support to deliver improved transfer speeds.
Later down the line, in mid-2011 to be more exact, the new hard drives will also make their way in the company's 3.5-inch Barracuda XT HDD line where they will be available in capacities of 3TB, 2TB, 1.5TB and 1TB.
“Organizations of all sizes and consumers worldwide are amassing digital content at light speed, generating immense demand for storage of digital content of every imaginable kind,” said Rocky Pimentel, Seagate executive vice president of Worldwide Sales and Marketing.
“We remain keenly focused on delivering the storage capacity, speed and manageability our customers need to thrive in an increasingly digital world,” concluded the company's rep.
Pricing has not been announced, but the 3TB version of the FreeAgent GoFlex Desk external drive is available for $229.99.
Sadly, we don't know if the units that are available for purchase now come with the new 1TB per platter HDDs or use older drive models.
Outside of Seagate, Hitachi GST (now a subsidiary of Western Digital) also has the technology to develop 1TB per platter drives as they proved when they developed the Travelstar Z5K500 2.5-inch hard disk drive which packs a similar areal density to that of Seagate's drive.