Seagate Ships 750-GB Drives; Externals Due Next Week

Seagate Technology officially brought its perpendicular-recording technology into the desktop drive market, announcing shipments of its first 750-Gbyte Barracuda internal drive Wednesday. A complementary external 750-Gbyte drive will be released this coming Monday.

According to Seagate spokesman Michael Hall, the suggested retail price of the 750-Gbyte Barracuda 7200.10 drive will be $590, while the 200-Gbyte model will sell for about $104. The drives began shipping last week to distributors, Hall said.

Somewhat surprisingly, the external 750-Gbyte Seagate External Hard Drive drive due next Monday will be priced at about $559; external drives are generally priced somewhat higher than their internal counterparts.

While it's relatively easy to add additional disk platters to a drive to increase its capacity, the new Barracuda 7200.10 drive contains four platters and eight heads, the same number of disks and heads used to design the prior-generation Barracuda, which used longitudinal-recording methods, Hall said.

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