The cost of hard drives keeps tumbling, to the extent that a 1TB mechanical drive can now be bought for around £65 if you know where to shop. The next jump in capacity comes in the form of the 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, recently usurped by the 1.5TB and 2TB Western Digital Caviar Greens.

Now, Samsung is tipping its hat into the 1.5TB ring with the EcoGreen F2EG. Hitting the capacity with three platters instead of four, Samsung goes on to say that 'the F2EG drive is 40% lower in power consumption in idle mode and 45% lower in reading/writing mode than competitive drives'. Perhaps it follows Western Digital's lead and operates with a variable rotational speed.

The family of drives will also include a single-platter 500GB, dual-platter 1TB, and the range-topping 1.5TB, with either 16MB or 32MB on-drive cache and the standard 3.0Gbps SATA2 interface.

Pricing, too, looks to be reasonable, with an MSRP of $149 for the 1.5TB model. A quick search at Newegg shows the Seagate drive to be available for $129.99. Let's hope that competition in this area drops prices to well below £100 in the UK.

Full details here.