Seagate's 750GB Hard Drive

Today Seagate introduced its Barracuda 7200.10, the first computer desktop hard disk to reach the 750-gigabyte storage mark. The drive has a retail price of $559. The drive would be able to hold 375 hours of standard-definition television or 75 hours of high-definition video or 10,000 music CDs converted to the MP3 format.

A technology called perpendicular recording (read our past posting) is what has made possible one of the largest capacity jumps in the hard drive industry's history. Today's hard drives store data lengthwise across the hard disk platter. On the other hand, Perpendicular recording drives store data perpendicular to the disk platter. This method provides two benefits: (i) Data is able to be stacked closer together, allowing for higher capacity, (ii) Data is more easily accessible, thus allowing drives with faster data transfer rates.

These new drives will soon make it into consumer electronics as well. One of the immediate uses of such capacity may be for the digital video recorder, allowing users to store more programming without having to worry about deleting it.

With the new drive having been launched a month ahead-of-schedule, it's definitely an indication of Seagate's edge over its competitors in terms of bringing perpendicular technology to the market.

Seagate's Fast Hard Drive

Seagate Technology has announced its Cheetah 15K.5 hard drive, the latest generation of Seagate's flagship enterprise product line. The new Cheetah 15K.5 drive delivers fast performance with high reliability. Available with up to 300 Gigabytes capacity and 30% increased performance, the Cheetah 15K.5 hard drive enables a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for a wide variety of enterprise applications from e-mail, Internet, and e-commerce, to business processing and decision support.

The Cheetah 15K.5 leveraged Seagate's R&D to create an enterprise hard drive with perpendicular recording. Perpendicular recording technology lets the Cheetah 15K.5 deliver twice the capacity of 15K drives currently available while providing a performance increase over previous generations by as large as 30%. Seagate is now shipping the Cheetah 15K.5 to OEM Customers. The Cheetah 15K.5 will be launched to the Distribution Channel later this quarter. The Cheetah 15K.5 is available in a choice of 3 Gb/sec Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Ultra320 SCSI, and 4 Gb/sec Fibre Channel interfaces with capacities of 73, 147, and 300 Gigabytes. It delivers an industry-leading Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) reliability rating of 1.4 million hours at full duty cycle.

Boot Camp

Last week Apple released the beta-version of a software called Boot Camp, which lets owners of Intel-based Mac computers install Microsoft's Windows as well as the MacOS operating system, which comes pre-loaded on the machines (To ratify our statement -- Boot Camp won't work with earlier Macs built around PowerPC chips). Many believe that embracing Windows could help Apple boost sales to some of the millions of people who have come to rely on Windows-compatible programs, but have fallen out of love with their Windows-based Personal Computers.

Apple has sold a few hundred thousand units of Intel-based Macs since October. Since Apple isn't pre-loading or selling copies of Windows XP, customers who don't already have a Windows XP CD have to pay the $200 retail price. Also, if someone wishes to install both operating systems, toggling between the MacOS and Windows (that is shutting down and restarting in OS of choice) would take a few minutes and may prove to be a major hurdle, as many have already encountered by installing both Windows and Linux in same machine. Last but perhaps the most important point to keep in mind is that neither Apple nor Microsoft has agreed to provide customer support for Windows on the Mac!

You can download 'Boot Camp' from here. You need an Intel-based Mac having Mac OS X Tiger v10.4.6 and 10GB free hard disk space.