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Perpendicular hard drives offer more storage density, but what about the performance?
If there is one axiom that has never faltered during the entire personal computer industry, it is that you can never have too much hard drive space. My first hard drive was a 30 MB model on a Packard-Bell PC/XT, and while it looked like a massive amount of storage at first, I filled it up within a couple of months.

As hard drives pass the 500 GB mark, they are starting to reach a limit on the density that information can be packed on magnetic platters. Specifically, a problem called the superparamagnetic effect starts to become a concern, as ambient heat causes the tiny magnetic particles to “flip their bits” from 0 to 1 or vice versa, damaging data integrity. One solution, which we reported on in January, is to arrange these magnetic particles vertically instead of horizontally on the surface of the platter, allowing greater information density without losing integrity.
Perpendicular storage

Seagate delivered the first high-end SCSI drive using perpendicular technology in April of this year, and announced their first consumer drive, a 750 GB SATA model, shortly thereafter. Now this drive, the Barracuda 7200.10, has been released to the public, and Tech Report has an in-depth review of its performance.

Overall, the drive performed well, and at a retail price around US$414 (US$0.55 per GB), it is competitive with 500 GB drives from other manufacturers, which cost about US$0.52 per GB. For people who have high storage needs, a 750 GB drive makes a lot of sense at these prices.

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