A report says Seagate is using five platters in its 3TB monster FreeAgent GoFlex external disk, not four. That's a quickie fix to up the capacity and not a significant increase in areal density as we suggested it might be.

Western Digital, Seagate and Hitachi GST each have 2TB, 3.5-inch form factor internal drives, and have packaged the technology to produce 2TB external drives. Yesterday's 3TB announcement by Seagate did not specify the number of platters.

If it was four then that signalled a significant areal density increase at the 3.5-inch drive level, to 750GB/platter.

Five platters means 600GB/platter, which is not such a big deal these days.

We've asked the company to confirm the platter number on the FreeAgent GoFlex 3TB model but have not heard anything yet. ®