Just a day after Hitachi and Philips boasted about its newest external 1TB offerings, Seagate is up on its own soap box clamoring over the "industry's first 250GB-per-disc, 3.5-inch disc drive." Touting the second-generation of perpendicular magnetic recording technology, the newest Barracuda 7200.10 stretches areal density limits by stuffing 180Gb per square inch, and also manages to "set new benchmarks" for power consumption, acoustics, and performance. The drives will feature a 3Gbps SATA interface and should pop up in future external models, but for now you can probably grab one in a retail box as Seagate has reportedly achieved worldwide volume deployments.

[Via TGDaily]

Fujitsu is always talking up this or that hard drive technology that's totally going to revolutionize the industry and so on, but at least this time around they've got some "solid" numbers. It's that same "areal density" spiel again, with Fujitsu claiming that a new vertical magnetic recording tech based on crystalline magnesium oxide allows them to sense even smaller magnetic pits, thereby allowing them to squeeze more data into each square inch. Fujitsu was promising 1TB per square inch a few months back, but it seems now they'll settle for 500-800GB per square inch -- which translates to a roughly 500 percent capacity increase -- and should be shipping samples out in a couple years. Start planning now how to best fill a 5TB drive, we're leaning towards backing up a few hundred DVDs and filling the rest with polka music -- it's a hard job, but somebody's got to do it. [Warning: subscription required]

[Via The Inquirer]