What the heck is perpendicular magnetic recording, you ask? In short, it's your ticket to higher and higher drive capacities. PMR is one of a handful of technologies some believe will substantially boost the areal density--the number of bits per square inch of storage surface--of hard drives in the near future.

According to Seagate, PMR is capable of delivering up to 10 times the storage density than that of longitudinal recording, which moves us well into the 10-Tbyte range.

In fact, Seagate has also been tinkering around with another areal-boosting technology, HAMR (or Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording), and says that it could someday yield 300 terabit (37.5 terabyte) HDDs. Great Googly Moogly, that's a lot of space!

For now, though, the company's one-disc Barracuda hard drive has an industry-leading data density of 180Gb per square inch and, according to Seagate, sets new benchmarks for power consumption, acoustics, and performance.

Also shipping is the Seagate Barracuda 3.5-inch 7200.10 desktop drive, which comes with a SATA 3Gb/s interface and will serve as the foundation for Seagate's 1-Tbyte desktop, enterprise, consumer electronics, and external hard drives, the company said.