Seagate begins shipping 1TB, 4-platter hard disk

In a press release issued yesterday, Seagate announced a new 1TB disk that will be rolling off their manufacturing lines. While 1TB disks aren't terribly big news, the new unit from Seagate does have a few aces up its sleeve, such as being the first unit to fit 1TB onto a mere four platters. In comparison, other 1TB models use a 5-platter design. The new unit has a data density of 180Gb per square inch and of course uses perpendicular magnetic recording, a technology that has proven itself to give disks a performance edge over comparable counterparts without it.

With such a high density and using PMR, it'll be very interesting to see how the performance of this unit compares to other 1TB units from Western Digital and Hitachi. Seagate's disk is already being shipped, so likely we'll see it in retail very soon. You can read the full press release at Seagate's site.