Seagate announces 500GB notebook drive

Seagate last week unveiled a 500GB 2.5-inch notebook drive as well as a 1.5TB desktop hard drive, claiming industry firsts for both.

The Barracuda 7200 has a record 1.5TB of data-storage space.

The Barracuda 7200 1.5TB drive is aimed at the desktop market and the half-a-terabyte jump in storage capacity from 1TB marks "the single largest capacity hard drive jump in the more than half-century history of hard drives", according to the company. Both drives use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology.

At the same time the company is offering two smaller capacity Momentus drives for notebooks in the 2.5in format. Momentus 5400.6 is a 5400-rpm drive, which uses the Serial ATA (Sata) 3Gbps interface and has capacities ranging from 120GB to 500GB with an 8MB cache.

The Momentus 7200.4 hard drive is a 7200-rpm drive and a Sata 3Gbps interface and comes in capacities ranging from 250GB to 500GB with a 16MB cache.

"Organisations and consumers of all kinds worldwide continue to create, share and consume digital content at levels never before seen, giving rise to new markets, new applications and demand for desktop and notebook computers with unprecedented storage capacity, performance and reliability," said Michael Wingert, vice president of Seagate's personal computer division.

The 1.5TB capacity Barracuda 7200.11 drive has four platters and uses a Sata 3Gbps interface with a sustained data rate of up to 120MBps. The 3.5-inch drive is also offered in capacities of 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB and 160GB with cache options of 32MB and 16MB.

Shipments of the Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB drive are set to begin next month, Seagate said, and delivery of the Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 drives is due to start in the fourth quarter of this year.