Seagate announces first 1TB drive

in brief Seagate Technology is serving up its first 1-terabyte hard drives.

The company announced today that it will offer 1TB hard drives for retail and enterprise, beginning in the third quarter of this year.

The Barracuda 7200.11 (right), priced at US$399 (AU$470), will have up to 32 megabytes of cache, a five-year warranty and a reported sustained transfer rate of 105MB/s.

Seagate also revealed an update to its enterprise-class Barracude range with the Barracude ES.2, boosting the capacity from 750GB to 1TB.

The amount of information that can be stored in a 1-terabyte drive is equal to turning 50,000 trees into paper, according to researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. Hitachi shipped its first terabyte drive two months ago, for the same price of US$399.

Local pricing and availability is yet to be announced.