Though chief rival Western Digital was the first to strike the 2TB mark, Seagate has gone a step further to kick out the market’s first drive built to the new SATA spec.

The spritely mechanical disk uses four 500MB platters and 64MB of cache to peg sustained transfer rates at up to 138MB/s. That’s no slouch for a mechanical drive, but it sits comfortably in the 600MB/s offered by SATA 6Gb/s.

The drive will be available in about a week for the surprisingly reasonable MSRP of $299.

It's $19.95 for Saturn's rings.

Techware Labs has found a way to turn the 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 hard drive into a WD Velociraptor fighter. You lose drive capacity but gain performance for half the price of the WD drive.

Seagate is delaying its enterprise SSD launch until 2010 as the firm has stubbed its toe developing controller tech. [via]

Tech Report tests the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 hard drive. Two 500GB platters spinning at 7200 rpm is good stuff.

Not to be left behind by Western Digital, the Seagate Constellation drive joins the 2TB club.

Monster-Hardware says the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 750GB hard drive is good once you update the firmware.

Seagate’s 1.5TB Barracuda drives experienced random freezing when they first came out, but a firmware update supposedly fixed the issue. Was performance affected?

The Seagate FreeAgent XTreme 1TB works well as an external backup drive.

It’s the holiday season, and that means it’s time to send yourself spiraling into crushing debt made possible by the power of plastic. While you could responsibly commit to a reasonable budget, we know that the seductive potential of a $600 PC that isn’t terrible may be too much for your feeble will. If you’re looking for a little rationalization to pull the trigger, chalk it up to aiding our abyss of an economy.

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TechReport reports on Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drive.