Seagate Technology announced first-to-market volume shipments of a mainstream desktop hard drive with the industry’s highest areal density. Packing 1TB of capacity on just two disks, Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.12 HD, a 3.5-inch 7200-RPM drive features an areal density of 329 Gigabits per square inch to deliver the best combination of capacity, performance and reliability for PCs, desktop RAID and personal external storage.

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

The Barracuda 7200.12 hard drive provides a stellar combination of storage capacity and speed required for today’s most demanding desktop PC applications. The drive’s Serial ATA 3Gb/second interface delivers an industry-leading sustained data rate of up to 160MB/second for fast boot, application startup and file access and a burst speed of 3Gb/second. The 3.5-inch drive is also offered in capacities of 750GB and 500GB with cache options of 32MB and 16MB.