Seagate Ships 750 Gb Desktop Drive

The Scotts Valley, Calif.-based storage maker said the internal drives are "part of the new Barracuda 7200.10 family" and are aimed at meeting growing capacity needs on the desktop with the expansion of digital media.

The drives were street-priced at $590, according to a Seagate spokesman, and precede a May 1 announcement of an external hard drive that will also run with a 750 Gb capacity.

The company also provided its own market research which projects an eight-percent growth in the personal storage market in 2006, crossing the 250 million unit shipment threshold. According to that research, Seagate now owns about 30 percent of the market for storage drives that are greater than 200 Gb; it is currently in the process of acquiring Maxtor, which owns another 26 percent share of the space.

The 7200.10 drive, a 3.5-inch drive, was designed with "perpendicular" disc drive technology, as opposed to "longitudinal" technology. Seagate says the different storage architecture. The company describes perpendicular architecture as standing "data bits on end on the disc platter, rather than flat to the surface" " a method which allows for much higher density.

The spokesman said Seagate was the first company to reach the market with a 750 Gb drive, but he declined to say how far off the company is from delivering a full terabyte on the desktop.