Having already taken the capacity lead in the storage market with its 1.5TB beast, Seagate is now looking to make the next leap and will begin shipping single platter 500GB HDDs as early as next week. They will be available for purchase for less than 50€.

Kicking off a new series of drives, the Barracuda 7200.12 500GB HDD is codenamed ST3500410AS and features a 16MB buffer with 3.0 Gbps SATA interface. Its singular platter not only makes it more economical/cheaper to manufacture, but technically it should run with lower access times as well.

But the particularly exciting thing about this drive is that it shouldn't be too long now before we see mention from the company about a quad platter version coming; equating to a whopping 2TB capacity.

Thanks to Tech Connect for the heads up.