Seagate Unveils World's First 1TB-Per-Platter Hard Drive

Seagate is smiling big today, having announced that it is the first ever to offer a hard drive containing 1TB platters. There are a total of four platters, making the drive an ordinary 4TB in size, but it is not the overall capacity that is the bragging point. Although it's not the most exciting announcement, there are some advantages to this drive over other 4TB offerings.

This 4TB drive offers a data transfer rate of 145MB/s, and utilizes about 35-less electricity over other 4TB drives because of the reduced number of platters. This also results in an increase in drive performance. The drive is being offered both with and without an external case: without will run you approximately $190USD, while with the case will bump the price to $212 USD.

This isn't Seagate's only claim to fame this year, with the company announcing last month that it is the first (and thus far, only) to ship 2 billion hard drives globally. Of those 2 billion drives, the first billion took about 30 years to sell, while the second billion took approximately 4 years to sell, a massive swing that shows the vastly increasing demand for storage.

Demand for hard drives – particularly, larger ones – is expected to rise as the quantity of digital content, such as high-definition videos, created by consumers increases. As such, even those who have invested in an external hard drive will likely find themselves buying a new one in the coming year or two as capacity and needs both increase. For now, 1TB platters are a step towards meeting that demand.

[via Tech Crunch]