New Samsung hard drives hit one terabyte areal density.

Heise Online is reporting that Samsung has broken the barrier on storage capacity for hard drives, pushing up to a one-terabyte-per-platter areal density in a new line of drives being shown off at this year's CeBIT convention in Hanover, Germany.

The company plans to use this technology to create two-terabyte hard drives that use just two platters, which the company was demonstrating at the convention. Future releases also include three- and four-terabyte hard drives, or nearly double the two-terabyte limit of consumer hard drives in the present-day.

Samsung's two-terabyte, two-platter disc—otherwise known by its model name, HN-D201RAE—will launch as part of the company's Spinpoint EcoGreen series of drives. These 5,400-RPM hard disks use slower rotational speeds to achieve greater power savings (and less heat and noise) then their conventional 7,200-RPM brethren. The sacrifice, of course, is that a 5,400-RPM drive can't beat the write and read speeds of a similarly configured 7,200-RPM device.

In addition, Samsung plans to pack 32-megabytes of cache within the drive itself. That's not uncommon on today's market by any means, but Samsung's switch to the SATA 6.0 Gbps is at least a head-nod toward future proofing. Without a RAID array, however, a typical consumer will see little to no benefit in using the third-generation interface.

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