Are all those music downloads slowing down your desktop? Fed up with upgrading your tape back-up system? The latest hard drive from storage giant Seagate has enough space for both your entire music collection and your corporate database.
The Barracuda 7200.7 and 7200.7 Plus can store up to 160 gigabytes of data - that is enough space for about 50,000 MP3 files or more than 40 million Nigerian e-mail scams.
Seagate drives were reportedly used in editing The Lord Of The Rings movies, and with space for 11 hours of digital video, one of these leviathans could be just right to store the entire trilogy and still have room for outtakes.
Seagate has increased the capacity by doubling up two disk platters. Both drives come in capacities of 160GB and 120GB, while the 7200.7 also offers 80GB or 40GB versions for the desktop PC market.
Users have the option of either a high-speed Serial ATA interface or the slower Parallel ATA found on older computer systems. With drives of this size, speed is important. Even the fastest Parallel ATA drives, better-known Ultra ATA, run at about 100MB per second, whereas these first-generation Serial ATA drives can deliver data at 15MBps.
For added speed, there is an onboard cache of 8MB on the Plus model, or the standard 2MB on the regular 7200.7.
According to Seagate, the drives can also withstand shocks of up to 350Gs.