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The thousand gigabyte-per-disk era is almost upon us

Earlier this year Seagate confirmed it would ship a 1TB hard drive before the second half of this year. With the first quarter of this year already over, the launch window for Seagate's next generation drive is rapidly shrinking.

Seagate would not confirm or deny the expectation of a new 7200.11 series this morning. Seagate representatives responded to our inquiries stating, "We already stated earlier this year that we would have the 1TB drive before the second half of this year."

Spanish-language site Chilehardware countered Seagate's announcement with specifications of the 11th generation Seagate Barracuda drive, which it listed as follows:

* 1 Terabyte capacity
* 7200RPM
* SATA 3.0Gbps interface
* Perpendicular recording
* NCQ
* 16MB of buffer
* 4 platters
* 8 heads

Seagate traditionally reserves new generation designations for platter advancements; the company has never released new generation indicators for storage increases alone. However, it has been a year refresh since the last platter update so it would not be unrealistic to expect new features on the soon-to-ship devices.

Seagate replied to DailyTech stating, "There is no embargo yet." However, we were still assured that the company would fulfill its ship date promise.

Hitachi Global Storage and Seagate released 1TB hard drive promises within hours of each other last January. Both manufacturers utilize Komag platter configurations -- Komag is the only platter manufacturer to announce 1TB designs to date.

DailyTech - Seagate Prepping 1TB Barracuda