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The new drive is a half-terabyte improvement on the previous 1TB record holder, giving lie to the claim that traditional hard disks are approaching the end of the road.

The Barracuda 7200.11 uses Seagate's new perpendicular magnetic recording technology and packs the 1.5TB into four platters. It offers a claimed data transfer rate of up to 120MB/second.

There are lesser-capacity variants of the Barracuda drive, ranging from 160GB to 1TB, with cache options of both 16 and 32MB.

Seagate has also announced two new 500GB drives for laptops, which too use the perpendicular technology. The 2.5in Momentus drives offer spin speeds of 5,400 and 7,200 rpm.

The company claims the drives can "withstand up to 1,000 Gs of non-operating shock" thanks to its free-fall sensor, which parks the heads away from the disk platters when the unit falls by as little as eight inches.

The 1.5TB desktop drive will be available in August, while the laptop drives won't arrive until later this year. Prices are yet to be announced for either.