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 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.
