It might not sound like the most exciting headline, but Seagate has managed to cram 400Gb onto a standard hard drive to fit in a standard 3.5inch PC hard drive slot. To put the story into perspective, our first hard drive for a PC was a whopping 45Mb some 14 years ago.

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 hard drive gives customers up to 400GB, and with the industry's highest data density, it's the first hard drive to store up to 133GB on a single platter. This basically means that Seagate can use fewer platters and heads and ensures fastest performance.

The Barracuda 7200.8 continues Seagate's interface leadership with the most advanced single-chip native Serial ATA (SATA) interface with native command queuing (NCQ), for a significant performance boost.

Seagate's native SATA interface technology with NCQ enables the Barracuda 7200.8 to match the performance of 10,000-rpm SATA drives without sacrificing capacity, and at a much more economical cost per gigabyte. The Barracuda 7200.8 with NCQ benefits applications like high-performance PCs such as gaming systems and workstations, PC-based home media servers and entry-level SATA servers. In addition, NCQ can make booting, application loading and file copying faster for everyday mainstream users.

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 hard drive range will also come in capacities of 200GB, 250GB, 300GB and comes with a five year warranty.

Pricing for the 8Mb cached version of the 400Gb hard drive is likely to be around £235 plus VAT.

>> Seagate - Official website of Seagate