After Hitachi and Samsung, Seagate announces today their 3.5-inch 1 tera-byte Barracuda 7200.11 drive with a 105MB/s sustained transfer rate – the highest ever. The drive has a low power rating of 8 watts at idle and acoustics, as low as 2.7 Bels, nearly undetectable by the human ear, an average seek times of 8.5ms and a 32MB cache.

The desktop 1TB Barracuda drive will begin shipping in volume during the third quarter for $399. There will also be an enterprise version of the drive (Barracuda ES.2 with a "power trim" feature reducing power consumption by 20% and with both Serial ATA/SAS interfaces) as well as one version optimised for the surveillance market and one drive for the PVR market.

"Hitachi did announce a 1 TB drive using an old technology with 5 disksx200GB, whereas Samsung announced one with 3 disks of 330GB (vs 4 disksx250GB for Seagate), also using perpendicular technology. However, for their tera-byte drive, Samsung is obliged to select the crop of the crop of the disks that comes out of their factory. Meaning Samsung will not be able to produce their drive in mass/volume. Moreover, Samsung's 1TB drive will not be cost-effective. So either they'll loose tons of money selling these drives or it will not sell at all", said Marc Jourlait (photo), Seagate's vice president of global marketing.

On the other hand, Seagate has already shipped millions of their 250GB/platter. "It's proven and reliable and we can build it in very high volume. ", says the exec.

"Also, the 1TB drive is Samsung's first generation using the perpendicular technology whereas we already shipped more than 42 millions of perpendicular drives since last year. And for their first generation, they chose to do the hardest thing to do i.e. 330GB per platter/disk. Another thing to point out is that our 1TB drive will ship with a 5 year warranty versus just only 3 years for our competiors", added Jourlait.

And the 1TB winner will be?

"Without being arrogant, we know we are going to be #1 on the 1TB drive market. Hitachi won the PR war, having announced their 1TB drive first. But the real test is to check back in September to see who shipped the most 1TB drives. And you will see that by then, Seagate will have shipped hundreds of thousands 1TB drives whereas the others might have shipped just several thousands combined!

And this should come at no surprise. We are investing more than $1.2 billion per year in R&D, more than the whole industry combined. Which translates directly in profits. Our net operating profits is more than the whole industry combined who's loosing money. The only other drive maker making money is Western Digital", said the Seagate VP.

Seagate also confirmed a 2.5" 1TB drive in the next couple years. "We already made a few of them. But it won't be available in high volume until a couple years", said Jourlait.