Can you really ever have enough hard disk storage? We don’t think so. All too many times we’ve gone and bought a monster hard drive and uttered those immortal words “I’ll never fill this!” only to find six months down the line that ripping our whole CD and DVD collection has made that once mighty drive seem woefully insufficient.

Of course hard disk manufacturers are always striving to release ever larger drives to slake our continued storage lust and 1TB hard drives are now increasingly commonplace in enthusiast systems thanks to continually tumbling prices that have made even a high performance 1TB drive well within everyone’s reach.

Going beyond 1TB of capacity is still rare though, and as of yetonly Seagate has released such a drive with its 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11. With an NTFS formatted capacity of 1397.26GB, it manages to pack more storage space into a shiny 3.5” wide box than any other hard disk drive (that is unless you count continued rumours of a 2TB Western Digital drive).
Seagate’s massive drive is able cram in all this storage thanks to the use of four massive 375GB drive platters, a shift from the quad 250GB drives used in Seagate’s smaller 1TB drive. This increase in platter density should certainly help to improve drive performance, especially when you consider the next highest densities per platter are the 334GB platters found in Samsung's Spinpoint F1 1TB.

With a higher density, the drive’s read/write heads have a shorter distance to travel between data on the platter, improving performance, so we’re hopeful for a noticeable step up in performance from Seagate’s 1TB.However, the use of four newer, larger platters, and their accompanying read/write heads means the price is going to be a fair bit higher than competing 1TB drives - over £35 in fact. Bizarrely though this doesn’t seem to be so much the case in the USA right now, with Seagate’s 1.5TB much more appealing to the wallet at just $30 more than Samsung’s 1TB champion.

Storage demands are not getting any lower by the day and hard drive manufacturers keep increasing the capacities to cope up with all our digital data usage such as pictures, movies and audio files. We take a look at two drives today- the Western Digital Caviar Black with 1000GB of unformatted space and the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 which has the largest capacity for a single drive at the moment- 1500GB of unformatted space.As you can see, both the drives support all the standard features such as NCQ, S.M.A.R.T. monitoring and Power Management. Not listed above is the amount of cache which is 32MB on both the drives. Temperatures reported by the WD are lower than the Seagateaccording to HD Tune and we saw this at both Idle and after a full run on PC Mark Vantage.

One little “ouch” is the amount of capacity that is lost after these drives are formatted. With Vista NTFS, the actual usable space of the Caviar is 931.5GB and the Barracuda is 1397.3GB. To put things in perspective, my MacBook Air drive is 80GB in size- pretty much the capacity these drives lose when formatted.