Man, if they push these platters any more they will become the ‘platters that splatter’! What Seagate has done with the Barracudas is impressive and with any luck will cue others in the hard drive arena.

In the hard drive world, capacity is king. Capacity actually comes in two flavors. The first and most obvious is the storage capacity of a hard drive. The second, and potentially more important, is the capacity of individual platters within a drive. This platter capacity is known as the areal density, and it can do more than just increase the amount of data a drive can hold. Higher areal densities allow drives to offer more storage capacity with fewer platters, potentially lowering noise levels, cutting power consumption, and reducing the risk of a catastrophic head crash. As if that weren’t enough, higher areal densities can also improve performance by allowing the drive head to access the same amount of data over a shorter physical distance. [Read the rest]