Hard drive manufacturer Seagate has announced drives featuring the highest-density data storage offered by the industry. The Barracuda 7200.12 HD is a 1 TB drive — nothing new there — but this drive is able to fit all its storage onto just two platters. Inside a hard drive, there are often multiple physical disks, or platters, stacked on top of each other with space in-between for read/write hardware. Drive designers can increase storage capacity by either fitting in more platters, or making each platter hold more data. This latest Seagate drive is able to store 500 GB per platter, which works out to just over 41 GB per square inch.

Higher-density platters have several benefits that make them meaningful to you. Although desktop owners can always add in another hard drive or two to increase storage, laptop owners are often stuck with just one internal drive, having to carry around external USB or eSATA drives to supplement their storage. With denser platters, larger capacity drives can be manufactured that still fit a laptop form factor. Hard drive failures often happen at the physical read/write interface between platters and the drive hardware. Fewer platters means fewer opportunities for your drive to crash. And finally, for sheer capacity junkies, combining high-density platters with stacks of them larger than the two in the 7200.12 HD means larger and larger individual drives. Seagate's drives should be shipping out to system manufacturers already.

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