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Find today's hard drive capacities too limiting? Seagate has just announced its first 1.5 terabyte desktop hard drive.

Storage manufacturer Seagate has just announced its new Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive, boasting a whopping 1.5 terabytes of storage capacity. Seagate's previous drives topped out at 1 TB; according to the company, the 1.5 TB unit marks the single largest jump in capacity in the more than half a century that hard drives have been around, thanks to perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology.

"Organizations and consumers of all kinds worldwide continue to create, share, and consume digital content at levels never before seen, giving rise to new markets, new applications, and demand for desktop and notebook computers with unprecedented storage capacity, performance, and reliability," said Seagate executive VP Michael Wingert, in a statement. "Seagate is committed to powering the next generation of computing today with the planet's fastest, highest-capacity, and most reliable storage solutions."

The four-platter, 3.5-inch Barracuda 7200.11 offers a 3 Gbps SATA interface offering up to 120 MB/s of data transfer, 7,200 rpm speed, and will be available with either 16 or 32 MB of cache. The drive will also be available in capacities ranging from 160 GB to 1 TB. The drives should begin shipping in August; Seagate did not announce any pricing details.

Seagate also announced its Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 2.5-inch notebook drives, offering capacities of up to 500 GB, offering 8 MB caches, 3Gbps SATA interfaces, and speeds of 5,400 and 7,200 rpm, respectively. Both drives are designed to take up to 1,000 G's of non-operating shock, and up to 350 G's of shock while running, and both incorporate a free-fall sensor that parks the heads off the disc in the event of a fall. Seagate didn't announce any pricing information, but says the drives should be available in the fourth quarter of 2008.