Seagate recently announced the launch of its first hard drive product with a capacity exceeding 1TB. This 3.5-inch Barracuda 7200.11 has a capacity of 1.5TB, which is a 50% increase compared to the highest-capacity hard drives currently available on the market. The hard drive features a 32MB cache, uses a Serial ATA 3Gb/s interface, and has a sustained data transfer rate of 120MB/s. It will be available next month. Similar to the 750GB (375GB * 2 platters) hard drive launched earlier by Hitachi, this hard drive consists of four 375GB platters. It is claimed that reducing the number of platters helps further lower power consumption, while the increase in platter density is mainly due to Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technology, which was first introduced by Seagate 30 months ago in a 2.5-inch 160GB hard drive. In addition to the 1.5TB model,