Seagate today declared the industry's first 2.5-in enterprise-class drive on 1TB of capacity, or about 60% more than could be stored previously.The drive is designed for "nearline" data center depot applications.The next generation Constellation allows for a standard 2U (3.5-in high) storage array to store up to 24TB, and a full server rack to store up to 500TB.

Meanwhile, Dell announced today that it is the first equipment maker to include the drive in a new array. Dell's MD1220 outside storage expansion array houses 24 2.5-inch drives for the maximum 24TB capacity. Up to eight expansion arrays can be agglomerative together for a maximum of 192TB of capacity, Dell said.

Western Digital equalled first to the table with a 1TB 2.5-in hard drive with last year's release of the Scorpio Blue, which was directed at laptops. That 5200rpm SATA drive had 3Gbit/sec output and contained three 333GB platters.