Last week we reported on some press information which was leaked on Seagate's website regarding its upcoming line of desktop hard drives in the Barracuda family. We all knew perpendicular magnetic recording was coming to the desktop domain but there was no solid date given out by Seagate representatives.

Upon contacting our Seagate press relations representative Thursday evening on the leaked information, we were informed that it was indeed a leak and it was a very premature leak at that. The new Barracuda line was not supposed to be introduced for another couple weeks according to the Seagate representative.

Today Seagate introduced the Barracuda 7200.10 line of desktop drives with a few new goodies. Not only does the 'Cuda 10' line feature perpendicular magnetic recording across all models, but the line also features a new high capacity model at 750GB. The industry's highest capacity at 750GB in a single disk drive is made possible by four 188GB platters which are written to using the perpendicular magnetic recording method.

The capacities range from 200GB to 750GB with PATA, SATA 1.5Gbps, and SATA 3.0Gbps interfaces. The 200GB and 250GB models have an 8MB buffer while the 250GB, 320GB, 400GB, and 750GB models feature 16MB buffers. The 250GB model comes in both 8MB and 16MB varieties. Seagate has also changed the way it measures the failure rate  with a percentage measure called the Annualized Failure Rate which is measured to be 0.34%.

Seagate claims the 7200.10 line has a 10% performance increase over the 7200.9 line of desktop drives launched late last year. There are claims that perpendicular megnetic recording will aid in performance increases so we can't wait to see the benchmarks for these puppies.

A complete price list has not yet been published, however, Seagate says the 200GB model will retail at about $104 while the 750GB model will carry a price tag of $590 upon launch. Launch will also come early, about 2 months early to be exact with the first wave of drives already shipping to distrubution channels. We should see the 7200.10 line of drives at online retailers within the next couple weeks and at brick and mortar stores within the next couple months. We should also start hearing about Momentus 5400 FDE drive's in the news as Seagate will be doing a limited launch to a handful of pilot organizations.