Today Seagate updated its Barracuda line with an industry first. The 2TB Barracuda XT drive uses a 6Gbps SATA interface and has twice as much theoretical bandwidth as existing SATA II drives. It gives the disk up to 600MBps in burst transfers. When it comes to actual speed, the drive is still pretty fast with a 140MBps sustained transfer rate and Seagate’s 64MB of onboard cache.

The Barracuda XT will support SATA II and 1.5Gbps SATA systems and should still reach its sustained speed on those models.

No matter what sort of crap you fill your hard drive with from porn, to digital photos, or music we always seem to need more space. At one point people thought they would never need more than a few megabytes of storage space. Today we know those people were loons.

Hitachi has announced the industry’s first 2TB hard drive that spins at 7200 rpm. The drive is the Deskstar 7K2000 and uses five platters to reach its capacity. Hitachi has platters that are 500GB each so why exactly it takes five is unknown.

Panasonic has announced a new series of DVRs that will be available in September. Six models in all, these new DVRs feature a Blu-ray recorder, a VHS player (for the DMR-BR670V) and your choice of 320GB / 500GB / 1TB / 2TB of HDD.

They come equipped with the latest UniPhier system LSI that integrates new AV data compression/decompression technology. The high-end model, the DMR-BW970 should be able to record up to 320hrs of video in MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 @ 12.9Mbps and supports Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby True HD, DTS-HD, can record on BD-RE / BD-R / DVD-RAM / DVD-R / DVD R DL / DVD-RW, and there’s also HDMI output, an SDHC card slot, the VIERA Link, and is DLNA.

Olive has unveiled a new line of stereos today in the form of the Opus. And it has some serious storage capacity and a unique design. It’s official name is the Opus No. 4. This stereo will conveniently save imported CDs in lossless FLAC format and has a touchscreen menu.

It will let you make playlists, listen to online radio stations and more. There’s also wireless playback. The Opus is available in several models to suit your needs. There’s a 500GB model, a 1TB model and an extreme 2TB model.

Western Digital has finally launched the industry’s first 2TB internal hard drive today in the US. It’s the highest capacity single HDD in the known universe, dubbed the 2TB Caviar Green. It’s available now for $299. The 3.5-inch platform drive includes 32MB of cache and is based on WD’s 500GB per platter technology with 400Gb/in2 areal density.

HotHardware had a sneak peek at the drive and has some benchmark results: The WD managed to hold its own against the Spinpoint F1 and Barracuda 7200.11.