Seagate Technology, the world’s largest maker of hard disk drives (HDDs), on Monday formally unveiled its first single-platter 500GB HDD. The new drive itself may be a very cost-effective high-capacity storage option for those who need it, but 500GB platters may enable 2TB (about 2000GB) hard drives in the near future, an unprecedented capacity.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 sports half-terabyte 3.5” platters with areal density of 329Gb per square inch, which is higher compared to competing offerings. Currently Seagate offers only 500GB, 750GB and 1000GB models, but going forward it can be expected that the company will also release 7200.12-series hard drives with three or four platters to provide 1.5TB or 2.0TB capacities.

Unfortunately, Seagate did not release a lot of technical details about its new Barracuda 7200.12 hard disk drives. The company said that the novelties will feature Serial ATA-300 interface, 32MB or 16MB cache as well as sustained data rate of up to 160MB/second.

“Demand for more desktop PC storage capacity is far from letting up as computer users worldwide generate massive amounts of digital content every day. Seagate is leading the industry with new storage solutions designed to store, share and manage all of that business- and user-generated content,” said Tom Major, Seagate’s vice president of personal compute business.

Prices and availability timeframes for Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 are unknown.

Tags: Seagate