Seagate is on the verge of announcing a 3.5in desktop hard drive with a capacity of 750GB - increasing the Barracuda 7200.10 line's maximum storage space by 50 per cent. Seagate hasn't formally announced the 750GB model, but it is already beginning to appear on the company's marketing material.

The drive runs at 7,200rpm and contains 16MB of cache memory. Like other models in the line, it has an average latency of 4.2ms. Seagate will offer the HDD with a choice of Ultra ATA 100, 1.5Gbps SATA or 3Gbps SATA interfaces. The Serial ATA versions both support Native Command Queuing (NCQ).

Seagate Technology (NYSE:STX), the world's number one hard drive maker, today surged to new levels of areal density and storage capacity leadership with the introduction of the world's first desktop hard drive to hit the 750GB capacity mark. The monster drive is part of the new Barracuda 7200.10 family built on perpendicular recording technology to meet the growing storage capacity, performance and reliability requirements of desktop computers and low-end servers.

The new Barracuda 7200.10 family is now shipping to the worldwide distribution channel. With the introduction of these drives, Seagate now delivers perpendicular recording technology across its desktop, notebook, enterprise, consumer electronics and retail hard drives. The technology stands data bits vertically onto the disc media, rather than horizontal to the surface as with traditional longitudinal recording, to deliver new levels of hard drive data density, capacity and reliability. The new data orientation also increases drive throughput without increasing spin speed by allowing more data bits to pass under the drive head in the same amount of time.

Desktop and workstation hard drive capacity takes another leap today, as Seagate has announced its new 750GB hard drive. The Barracuda 7200.10, with its 750GB capacity, represents one of the largest drive capacity leaps ever, as until now, drives had topped out at 500GB.