Hard drive maker Seagate Technology has started shipping a drive targeted at personal computers that offers 400GB of storage space, it says. The increasing popularity of PC-based multimedia applications, particularly home video editing and downloading of movies and TV shows, is driving demand for larger capacity hard drives in the PC space.
In addition to high-storage capacities, such drives need to be able to read and write data to the drive fast enough to keep up with real-time video. The drive is the fourth member of Seagate"s Barracuda 7200.8 series of drives and is available in two versions, one with an Ultra ATA/100 interface and one with a Serial ATA interface. The rotational speed of the disc is 7200 rpm (revolutions per minute), with an average seek time of 8 milliseconds.