What's the hard-disk equivalent of Moore's Law? It's ever-increasing areal density. Now Seagate Technology has applied perpendicular recording technology (standing data bits on end rather than lying horizontally on the media) to reach 130 gigabits per square inch or up to 188GB per platter -- yielding the first 3.5-inch PC hard drive to hold 750GB. The Barracuda 7200.10 series is available in sizes from one-fifth to three-quarters of a terabyte, supporting 1.5Gb/sec and 3.0Gb/sec Serial ATA data-transfer rates with native command queuing to reduce head movement and streamline the delivery of queued commands to the drive.

Equipped with 8MB to 16MB of cache, the drives feature reliability-boosting Clean Sweep technology that passes the drive head over the entire platter during power-on to smooth out any irregularities, as well as Adaptive Fly Height that maximizes the consistency of read/write performance by adjusting the distance between the head and platter depending on operating conditions. The Seagate 750GB Pushbutton Backup Hard Drive puts the new capacity champion into an external USB 2.0 and FireWire-interface device with one-touch system and data-file backup, as well as room for tens of thousands of digital photos or songs. Shipping next month for $559, the drive can be stacked to create a multiterabyte storage system in a 7 by 7-inch footprint.