Seagate unveils 3TB external hard drive

HARD DRIVE MAKER Seagate has claimed to have broken the areal density barrier so it can offer 1TB of storage capacity per platter on its hard disk drives.

Seagate reckoned it has achieved an areal density of 625GB per square inch on its upcoming 3.5-inch Goflex external hard drives. The storage vendor said it can fit three disk platters on the Goflex hard drives, giving them 3TB of storage capacity.

Seagate said the drives should be large enough to cope with the demands of HD multimedia content with enough capacity to store up to 120 HD movies, 1,500 video games, shedloads of photos and music, or some combination of all of these.

The external 3.5in hard drives come only in black, can be positioned either vertically or horizontally and are compatible with Windows or Mac OS X. They also have a NTFS Mac driver so Apple Mac users can store and access Windows files.

The company already has an internal 3TB Barracuda XT drive based on the same technology but this is the first time it has announced a 3TB external drive among its Goflex products. Seagate also launched an ultra thin 320GB Goflex external drive last month.

The drives come only a couple of weeks after Seagate and Samsung struck a deal to combine their hard drive businesses in a £845 million agreement. Samsung apparently wanted to back out of making hard drives and will now supply NAND flash memory to Seagate.

Seagate will release its line of large Goflex external hard drives in capacities of 1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB and 3TB some time this Summer but it hasn't put prices on them yet. µ