Seagate Reveals HDD With 1 TB Platters

For those who still can't give up the tried-and-true method of serving up data on a silver platter, Seagate has revealed a new flagship 3.5-inch hard drive with an areal density of 625 Gigabits per square inch using 1 TB platters. The drive, slated as the "world's first" for the general consumer, will be added to the company's GoFlex Desk line sometime in mid-2011 and eventually offered in four storage capacities: 3 TB, 2 TB, 1.5 TB and 1 TB.

Seagate said that the first model-- the Barracuda XT 3 TB HDD-- will have enough storage to house up to 120 HD movies, 1,500 video games, thousands of photos and virtually countless hours of digital music. Compatible with both PC and Mac, the drive will also come packed with an NTFS driver for Mac, allowing it to store and access files from both Windows and Mac OS X computers without reformatting. Rotational speeds and other hardware specs were not provided.

Although Seagate is the first HDD manufacturer to bring the new high-density drives to the market, Samsung was actually the first to break the barrier on storage capacity for hard drives using one-terabyte-per-platter areal density. The tech was shown at CeBIT 2011 and will be used to create 2 TB HDDS using only two platters, the company said.

Kevin Parrish
Contributor

Kevin Parrish has over a decade of experience as a writer, editor, and product tester. His work focused on computer hardware, networking equipment, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and other internet-connected devices. His work has appeared in Tom's Hardware, Tom's Guide, Maximum PC, Digital Trends, Android Authority, How-To Geek, Lifewire, and others.

  • nforce4max
    Cool
    Reply
  • mikewong
    Yeah... Of course!
    But what about reliability?
    Reply
  • Mottamort
    I still have a 450mb hard drive from seagate :D
    Reply
  • toastninja17
    cooooooooost
    Reply
  • jrharbort
    The increased density will also translate to faster read/write rates. I wouldn't be surprised if 7200 RPM versions were capable of reaching 140~150MB/s peak read rates.

    These would be perfect for mass storage drives alongside an SSD in performance machines.
    Reply
  • banthracis
    How exactly are they gonna turn 1tb platters into a 1.5tb drive? You can't use half a platter...
    Reply
  • ko888
    banthracisHow exactly are they gonna turn 1tb platters into a 1.5tb drive? You can't use half a platter...A platter has two sides, 0.5 TB per side.

    The drive could have two platters and three heads.
    Reply
  • kancaras
    A platter has two sides, 0.5 TB per side.

    The drive could have two platters and three heads.
    i think toshiba or another company is using three platter drives. anyway how can you put 3Gs in a 2-platter drive?
    Reply
  • omnimodis78
    "ZoomFor those who still can't give up the tried-and-true method of serving up data on a silver platter"
    --------------------------------------------------
    OK, we're not exactly talking about 3.5" floppy diskettes here! You make it sound like HDD options are some archaic form of technology. Even with the best SSD system drive in one's PC, it makes 100% sense to have 1 or more HDDs as the data drives. I have a 60GB SSD for system, and just over 5TB of HDD drives. Perfect for my many movies, music, documents, and photos. No way I could afford or would even honestly care to put these things on SSD. It would be like building a regular garage on prime real estate...
    Reply
  • kilo_17
    Neat. I can never imagine needing 3TB worth of storage, myself. I still have quite a bit of room on my 320GB Caviar Blue.
    Reply