Seagate perpendicular drive is big

The Barracuda ST3750640AS drive is available with ATA100 or Serial ATA II/300 interfaces. The latter is a native Serial ATA unit so you get NCQ (native command queuing), hotplug and hotswap capabilities, writes Simon Crisp.

By using its perpendicular technology, Seagate has crammed 188GB on each platter, so the drive just uses four platters to achieve its enormous capacity.

Perpendicular recording stands data bits in a vertical position instead of the usual horizontal plane allowing more bits to be packed on a disk.

The drive has a spin speed of 7,200rpm and a 16MB cache and comes with a five-year warranty. It's also one of the quieter drives on the market.

We put Seagate's new drive through our standard performance tests and you can see the results here.

It obviously can't match the faster 10,000rpm drives in terms of speed, but it's still a reasonably fast drive.

If you can afford the whopping £352.44, this is currently the biggest hard drive you can buy. ?

L'INQ
Our new mates