Seagate launch drive with 500GB on single platter

Seagate and Toshiba both launched new disk drives this week offering 500GB capacity which is emerging as the new industry standard for a basic disk drive.

The Seagate drive offers 500GB on a single platter of its 3.5in, 7200RPM Barracuda 7200.12 HD drive which come standard with two disks on a 1TB drive. At 329Gbits per square inch, Seagate claims the "world's highest areal density" for the drive.

The drive has a Serial ATA (SATA) 3Gb/second interface delivers which, according to Seagate, has "a 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, the company said in a statement.

The 500GB 'Frost White' device from Toshiba is a portable consumer device that comes at a cost of £120. Unlike the Seagate drive it is intended for consumer use and is cheap but Toshiba do not give any details of performance, data access speeds and such.

Its sales point is that it offers a lot of storage space for a low cost.