Digital Home Thoughts: Seagate Sets New Areal Density Record for Portable Hard Drives

"What's more significant about 1TB in this new form factor is that in order to make a drive at this capacity, Seagate reached a NEW areal density record-500GB-per platter! Areal density, which is also alternatively referred to as bit density, is the measurement of how much data can fit on an electronic storage device and is expressed in the number of bits that can be found in every square inch of space on the device. Translated into layman's terms , this essentially means that the greater the areal density, the more data can be stored in a smaller amount of physical space. Larger areal density also means faster transfer of data on a computer because the device drive doesn't have to look as far for the data."

It's quite staggering how much storage they can cram into a portable hard drive these days - yesterday afternoon a Seagate 1.5 TB FreeAgent GoFlex drive appeared on my doorstep, and I was amazed that 1500 GB worth of storage could be so small. I think this announcement is even more impressive though - Seagate has been able to shrink the chassis size down considerably (above is a before and after image), and even better boost speed. I've been told that the new 1 TB drive, using H2Bench as a measurement tool, cranks out 100 MB/s (not sure if that's read or write) compared to 83 MB/s from the previous 750 GB drive. Smaller? Faster? And USB 3.0 right out of the box? Sold!