Scotts Valley (CA) - Seagate reclaims storage capacity leadership in the hard drive market with a 1.5 TB drive, which represents a stunning 50 percent improvement over the largest drives currently available on the market.

Just yesterday we reported about Hitachi GST’s new 3.5" drive, which features a substantial increase in storage density (320-375 GB per disk), but kept the maximum storage capacity at 1 TB: While the previous 1 TB drive used five disks to hit 1 TB (5 x 200 GB), the new model uses only three (3 x 333 GB) in an effort to reduce the power consumption of the device. Seagate, which has been trailing the rest of the hard drive industry in terms of storage capacity for more than two years, today said that it matches the storage density of Hitachi’s new 750 GB model (2 x 375 GB) and will offer a hard drive with four disks and a capacity of 1.5 TB (4 x 375 GB) beginning in August.

The 3.5 inch Barracuda 7200.11 drive is also offered in capacities of 1TB, 750 GB, 640GB, 500 GB, 320 GB and 160 GB with cache options of 32 MB and 16 MB.

The big increase in storage density has been made possible through perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, which was first introduced in Seagate’s 2.5 inch 160 GB drives about 30 months ago. Seagate said it is also updating its 2.5 inch drives soon with 5400 rpm mainstream models and 7200 rpm performance versions offering up to 500 GB of capacity.

Both Momentus drives are built tough enough to withstand up to 1,000 Gs of non-operating shock and 350 Gs of operating shock to protect drive data, making the drives ideal for systems that are subject to rough handling or high levels of vibration. For added robustness in mobile environments, the Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 are offered with G-Force Protection, a free-fall sensor technology that helps prevent drive damage and data loss upon impact if a laptop PC is dropped.

Shipments of the Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 hard drives are scheduled to begin in Q4 2008.

Pricing has not been announced.

Source : Tom's Hardware US