You know, we're not actually certain we want to trust 1.5TB of our precious precious NES ROMS invaluable work data to a single drive, but that doesn't mean Seagate's latest Barracuda isn't droolworthy regardless. The jump from 1TB to 1.5TB is the "largest capacity hard drive jump in the more than half-century history of hard drives," according to Seagate, and the perpendicular-recording drives should begin shipping in August. There are also a pair of Momentus 2.5-inch 500GB notebook drives coming in Q4 in 5400 and 7200RPM speeds, but like big brother, pricing is unavailable -- we've got a hunch you might want to start saving those pennies, though.

[Thanks, Dave]

Perhaps due to the raging insecurities of playing catchup to Hitachi's 1TB disk, Seagate just announced a couple more 1TB drives in what has quickly become a confusing HDD line-up. Joining their previously announced 1TB Barracuda 7200.10 are the SATA-equipped Barracuda 7200.11 for consumers and business class Barracuda ES.2 with SAS interface. This time however, Seagate had the good manners to at least provide a date and price: Q3 and $399.99. Right, exactly the same price as Hitachi's 7K1000.

Update: Seagate just gave us some clarification on the 7200.10 vs. 7200.11: "The 7200.10 that was announced was a 250GB single-platter design; the purpose of it was to leverage the new areal densities we achieved and put it into the current 7200.10 chassis with the core electronics. It is shipping today. The 7200.11 and ES.2 use the same areal densities but are a new generation design with updated electronics, etc." So there you have it.

Months after Hitachi announced their big 3.5-inch, 1TB drive, Samsung and Seagate have finally matched that capacity by sheepishly launching their own 3Gbps SATA disks. Sammy does it all with efficiency boy, by spinning 3x 334GB platters to Hitachi's 5x 200GB platters (10 heads) or Seagate's 4 platters (8 heads) of 250GB each. That little trick should keep the weight, decibels, and power draw of their SpinPoint F1 (pictured) to a minimum. Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 still packs that impressive 32MB buffer which Samsung and Seagate can only aspire to with their 16MBs of respective cache. Expect both of the newcomers to be priced around $400. Cheap, but we'll be holding our wad for the inevitable head-to-head (to-head) shootout we're sure somebody is cooking up.

Read -- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
Read -- Samsung SpinPoint F1

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]

Well, it's been a rather long year or so since 500GB drives came into style as the standard for high end disks, but it looks like perpendicular recording will save the day in stagnant storage. Seagate's inadvertently leaked the Barracuda 7200.10 line of SATA drives with speeds up to 3Gbps (SATA II), 7200rpm, 4.16ms latency, NCQ, 16MB cache, and 750GB of storage. 750 freaking gigs, man. Just another step on the magic road to a 1 terabyte petabyte drive though, you know? [Warning: PDF link]

[Via DailyTech, thanks, Diego]