Back in June, Seagate promised us a 1-terabyte hard disk drive in time for autumn, and here it is: the Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS. This drive is so large, so capacious, that according to the University of California at Berkeley, it can store as much information as turning 50,000 trees into paper.
Seagate has managed this feat by using perpendicular recording technology, which you can read more about on page 3 of this article. The end result is higher data density than possible with traditional longitudinal recording technology and 1,000GB of pure, unadulterated storage joy.
Seagate is aiming the 7200.11 at pretty much everyone. It says it's intended for use in "workstations, desktop RAID systems, gaming PCs, high-end PCs, mainstream PCs", and as a general backup solution. When we installed it, Windows reported the available space as being 931.5GB, which is lower than the 1,000GB one would expect due to the differences between the decimal and binary methods of counting bits and bytes. Either way, it's possible for one 7200.11 drive to store nearly 1,400 DivX movies, 500,000 high-resolution images, or 240,000 MP3s -- that's more than any single drive that came before it.
If the £225 required to purchase the ST31000340AS is too rich for your blood, Seagate also offers Barracuda 7200.11 drives in 750GB and 500GB versions, costing £127 and £65 respectively. All three have the same Serial ATA II interface, 32MB of cache memory and 7,200rpm spindle speed.
Let's take a look at how it performs.
iPhone App 
Newsletters 
RSS Feeds 
Send Us Tips 
